7 ms·

Don't buy the IEEE edition of my book

121 points by geekam 12y ago

DiabloD3 12y ago
And we yelled at Amazon and Apple for inflated ebook prices. Heh.
mindslight 12y ago
protip: I've found IEEE Xplore becomes much more reasonable when you hide a Sparc IPX in the ceiling at MIT.
- serf 12y ago
  it's funny to consider trying to hide one of those bricks
  - pling 12y ago
    It's pretty easy to lose one. A company I worked for had a SPARC LX (similar chassis) as the internal primary DNS server. It stopped working one day and they couldn't find it. Turns out someone had pulled a cable hard inside the back of a rack and it had fallen down behind some switches inside the rack. Lovely machines, until you fire up Oracle 8i's Java front end (the name of which escapes me). Took 7 minutes to start.
mikevm 12y ago
I think the only people who access IEEE Xplore are though who have library subscriptions. Otherwise these per-chapter prices don't make any sense.
- amirmansour 12y ago
  In grad school I once saw $8K+ for an introductory chapter of standards document. Even if my lab was willing to pay that price, I considered that price to be unacceptable by any standard. So I instead found the same document on a public FTP server of some professor in Brazil. The internet is a wonderful place.
bronson 12y ago
And I thought the IEEE's most irritating feature was shoveling life insurance scams (& other snailmail spam) at its members every month.
- wwwwwwwwww 12y ago
  IEEE also actively lobbies against any kind of patent reform.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Once I got car insurance (I don't even have a car) offers from the IEEE I made sure I wouldn't renew.
pling 12y ago
This doesn't surprise me. The whole academic publishing side of things is a royal pile of shit. Glad someone is calling them up on it. Recently I snagged a copy of "The Art of Electronics" for reference. This has a retail whack of about £40 here in the UK even with Amazon's smackdown and second hand value on top of it. Decided screw that and bagged a copy on eBay. What turned up was an affordable edition destined for Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India with a big warning not to sell outside those areas stamped on it. I paid £5 including delivery. Going back to when I did my EE degree, I paid out £340 on textbooks in one semester. Ugh it's pitiful and pisses me right off.
- mediumdave 12y ago
  > This doesn't surprise me. The whole academic publishing side of things is a royal pile of shit. Glad someone is calling them up on it. The ACM, at least, allows authors to post copies of articles on their web pages. That's a not totally unreasonable policy (although the ACM Digital Library is pretty well locked down). I completely agree that IEEE is evil. Random fact: Peter Suber was my academic advisor in college! Incredibly smart and nice guy.
  - mcintyre1994 12y ago
    In fairness Peter's book is freely available online too, and sold like normal reasonably so it's not like IEEE are locking it down or anything. Definitely ridiculous pricing though.
  - justin66 12y ago
    > The ACM, at least, allows authors to post copies of articles on their web pages. That's a not totally unreasonable policy (although the ACM Digital Library is pretty well locked down). Does that include valuable stuff that's buried in conference proceedings?
- rooneel 12y ago
  >I paid £5 including delivery. While I agree IEEE is evil, the practice is standard among publishers, or any economic entity. It's called price discrimination (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination). The seller usually makes the difference the amount that price arbitrage is unprofitable. The producer (IEEE in this case) often does this to create presence in markets where it would otherwise be uncompetitive: the pricing reflects the cost only of printing and getting the book to the customer. Do we all want to buy books at South Asian prices? YES! Can we: No! That would drive the producers dead right away.
pbhjpbhj 12y ago
Why did the author license IEEE to sell the book in the first place if he didn't want them to use their exploitative pricing model?
- p4bl0 12y ago
  The first sentence of the post is "In January 2013 the IEEE Xplore digital library began hosting digital copies of 400+ books published by MIT Press". I don't think he personally agreed to anything, the publishers IEEE and The MIT Press must have decided to do something with some books which they didn't need author consent for.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    Yeah, I saw that too, the trail is still there - he's no fool and, as his book testifies, knows copyright in depth. You'd think he might stipulate with his publisher that he had some say in sub-licensing or set some sanity limits on sales or something? My guess at the first response to my answer above would be "MIT Press wouldn't take it on then". But then it becomes a case of "my price for the copyright in this book allowed MIT Press to do this", which is fine but means that he sold the license still that enabled this. Incidentally the economics aren't entirely clear to me. The author says IEEE charge $15 per chapter. But it's MIT Press's book (effectively), how much are they getting? How much is the author getting. Is the story here [just] "authors have bad contracts with their publishers". It's almost like a malicious joke - "This OA guy wants to sell his book for $11 and use a CC license, so we're going to sell it for 20-times that just to screw with him. The kicker, it's not even open access! Lol! That'll teach him.". You'd think the first line of this guys publishing contract/license would read "all version of this book, sub-licensed or otherwise must be OA without exception".
    - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      So, authors have perfect contracts? Or, he shouldn't bother controlling exploitation of his works? Or, he shouldn't know as a copyright expert how to deal with such issues? Or, IEEE aren't really acting exploitatively? All, none? What then?
p4bl0 12y ago
Peter Suber's book on Open Access is really great, but I think it lacks perspectives on the use of the Open Access movement to fight bibliometrics. If you speak French I recently wrote a detailed introduction to the Open Access movement which points out the relationship between the two movements and how Open Access can help to go in the right direction wrt fighting bibliometrics. It available at http://pablo.rauzy.name/openaccess/introduction.html http://pablo.rauzy.name/openaccess/introduction.html.
NAFV_P 12y ago
After two years of learning to code I have spent in total about £30 on books. It would not have been possible without the WWW.

121 points by geekam 12y ago

DiabloD3 12y ago

And we yelled at Amazon and Apple for inflated ebook prices. Heh.

mindslight 12y ago

protip: I've found IEEE Xplore becomes much more reasonable when you hide a Sparc IPX in the ceiling at MIT.

serf 12y ago
it's funny to consider trying to hide one of those bricks
- pling 12y ago
  It's pretty easy to lose one. A company I worked for had a SPARC LX (similar chassis) as the internal primary DNS server. It stopped working one day and they couldn't find it. Turns out someone had pulled a cable hard inside the back of a rack and it had fallen down behind some switches inside the rack. Lovely machines, until you fire up Oracle 8i's Java front end (the name of which escapes me). Took 7 minutes to start.

mikevm 12y ago

I think the only people who access IEEE Xplore are though who have library subscriptions. Otherwise these per-chapter prices don't make any sense.

amirmansour 12y ago
In grad school I once saw $8K+ for an introductory chapter of standards document. Even if my lab was willing to pay that price, I considered that price to be unacceptable by any standard. So I instead found the same document on a public FTP server of some professor in Brazil. The internet is a wonderful place.

bronson 12y ago

And I thought the IEEE's most irritating feature was shoveling life insurance scams (& other snailmail spam) at its members every month.

wwwwwwwwww 12y ago
IEEE also actively lobbies against any kind of patent reform.
MichaelGG 12y ago
Once I got car insurance (I don't even have a car) offers from the IEEE I made sure I wouldn't renew.

pling 12y ago

This doesn't surprise me. The whole academic publishing side of things is a royal pile of shit. Glad someone is calling them up on it. Recently I snagged a copy of "The Art of Electronics" for reference. This has a retail whack of about £40 here in the UK even with Amazon's smackdown and second hand value on top of it. Decided screw that and bagged a copy on eBay. What turned up was an affordable edition destined for Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India with a big warning not to sell outside those areas stamped on it. I paid £5 including delivery. Going back to when I did my EE degree, I paid out £340 on textbooks in one semester. Ugh it's pitiful and pisses me right off.

mediumdave 12y ago
> This doesn't surprise me. The whole academic publishing side of things is a royal pile of shit. Glad someone is calling them up on it. The ACM, at least, allows authors to post copies of articles on their web pages. That's a not totally unreasonable policy (although the ACM Digital Library is pretty well locked down). I completely agree that IEEE is evil. Random fact: Peter Suber was my academic advisor in college! Incredibly smart and nice guy.
- mcintyre1994 12y ago
  In fairness Peter's book is freely available online too, and sold like normal reasonably so it's not like IEEE are locking it down or anything. Definitely ridiculous pricing though.
- justin66 12y ago
  > The ACM, at least, allows authors to post copies of articles on their web pages. That's a not totally unreasonable policy (although the ACM Digital Library is pretty well locked down). Does that include valuable stuff that's buried in conference proceedings?
rooneel 12y ago
>I paid £5 including delivery. While I agree IEEE is evil, the practice is standard among publishers, or any economic entity. It's called price discrimination (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination). The seller usually makes the difference the amount that price arbitrage is unprofitable. The producer (IEEE in this case) often does this to create presence in markets where it would otherwise be uncompetitive: the pricing reflects the cost only of printing and getting the book to the customer. Do we all want to buy books at South Asian prices? YES! Can we: No! That would drive the producers dead right away.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago

Why did the author license IEEE to sell the book in the first place if he didn't want them to use their exploitative pricing model?

p4bl0 12y ago
The first sentence of the post is "In January 2013 the IEEE Xplore digital library began hosting digital copies of 400+ books published by MIT Press". I don't think he personally agreed to anything, the publishers IEEE and The MIT Press must have decided to do something with some books which they didn't need author consent for.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  Yeah, I saw that too, the trail is still there - he's no fool and, as his book testifies, knows copyright in depth. You'd think he might stipulate with his publisher that he had some say in sub-licensing or set some sanity limits on sales or something? My guess at the first response to my answer above would be "MIT Press wouldn't take it on then". But then it becomes a case of "my price for the copyright in this book allowed MIT Press to do this", which is fine but means that he sold the license still that enabled this. Incidentally the economics aren't entirely clear to me. The author says IEEE charge $15 per chapter. But it's MIT Press's book (effectively), how much are they getting? How much is the author getting. Is the story here [just] "authors have bad contracts with their publishers". It's almost like a malicious joke - "This OA guy wants to sell his book for $11 and use a CC license, so we're going to sell it for 20-times that just to screw with him. The kicker, it's not even open access! Lol! That'll teach him.". You'd think the first line of this guys publishing contract/license would read "all version of this book, sub-licensed or otherwise must be OA without exception".
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    So, authors have perfect contracts? Or, he shouldn't bother controlling exploitation of his works? Or, he shouldn't know as a copyright expert how to deal with such issues? Or, IEEE aren't really acting exploitatively? All, none? What then?

p4bl0 12y ago

Peter Suber's book on Open Access is really great, but I think it lacks perspectives on the use of the Open Access movement to fight bibliometrics. If you speak French I recently wrote a detailed introduction to the Open Access movement which points out the relationship between the two movements and how Open Access can help to go in the right direction wrt fighting bibliometrics. It available at http://pablo.rauzy.name/openaccess/introduction.html http://pablo.rauzy.name/openaccess/introduction.html.

NAFV_P 12y ago

After two years of learning to code I have spent in total about £30 on books. It would not have been possible without the WWW.