[HN Gopher] Wiley's removal of hundreds of titles from ebook col...
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Wiley's removal of hundreds of titles from ebook collections
Author : DanBC
Score : 104 points
Date : 2022-09-21 15:20 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.libraryassociation.ie)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.libraryassociation.ie)
| Ligma123 wrote:
| These big publishing group having these business models do a
| great job at convincing me to subscribe to them.
|
| Oh you subscribed to have access to this particular set of books?
| Oops we removed them, tough luck. I am sure your thousands of
| dollars were worth it.
|
| And who even owns Wiley?
| lioeters wrote:
| > [Founded in 1807,] Wiley has been publicly owned since 1962.
| While the company is led by an independent management team and
| Board of Directors, the involvement of the Wiley family is
| ongoing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiley_(publisher)
|
| As far as their being part of the publishing industry, it
| suffices only to say that they sued the Internet Archive.
| froh wrote:
| https://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=WLY
|
| no big single majority owner. a number of funds though in the
| 5-9% range.
| site-packages1 wrote:
| Wiley is such trash. In college in engineering the prof would
| assign us workbook problems from the book. I did all of them to
| stay practiced (and did well in the classes!). Lots of people
| expressed interest in my answers so they could use them to study.
| I gave them away, then started selling the answers only, which
| weren't provided in the course books, online.
|
| Wiley threatened to sue me for copyright infringement. As a
| college student the threat of a lawsuit really rattled me, so I
| paid them a bunch of money to settle it.
|
| How are you as a giant company going to threaten to sue a college
| student for copyright infringement for something derivative of
| your books?? To this day I have a strong, visceral negative
| reaction to Wiley and at least twice in my professional life have
| dissuaded orgs I've worked for from having anything to do with
| Wiley, so hopefully cost them at least as much as they cost me
| monetarily.
| colpabar wrote:
| Lawsuits are just another form of income for big companies like
| that. They saw you making money and realized that your money
| could be theirs instead.
| helloworld11 wrote:
| I've commented this here before and it's worth repeating again.
| Any time at all no matter what digital good you're buying
| (especially movies and ebooks), strip the DRM if at all possible,
| by any means possible (fuck the laws that prohibit this, they
| wholeheartedly deserve to be ignored for personal use) and find a
| way to truly own your work. If a seller claims they sold
| something to you, it should be yours for as long as you want to
| keep it with absolutely no bullshit like this making the idea of
| ownership into an insulting joke forced upon people as if they
| were idiots.
|
| The sad thing is that many people seem to act like exactly what
| these companies consider them by actually trusting to never lose
| access to their archives of "owned" content. Apparently, it's
| "just convenient". Not so much when you suddenly lose it to
| corporate shittiness.
| colpabar wrote:
| This is why I torrent everything, and will for the rest of my
| life.
| Wingman4l7 wrote:
| Richard Stallman's "The Right to Read" sci-fi short story has,
| unfortunately, aged very well:
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
| bismuthcrystal wrote:
| Once again, as always, Stallman was right.
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| The important part:
|
| > We further object to the new model that Wiley is pursuing,
| which is to sell its books as etextbooks on a subscription model
| based on class sizes for exorbitant fees. It is a model that is
| unsustainable, anti-competitive and highly problematic in the use
| of public funds. It erodes libraries' rights, is time-consuming
| to adopt, the pricing is lacking in transparency and there is no
| predictability about access or prices from year to year.
| musicale wrote:
| > The sudden removal of these titles makes ebook collections
| similarly unpredictable
|
| It's disappointing how much effort some people in our field have
| devoted to imposing the limitations of paper books on bits,
| thereby eliminating much of the benefit of ebooks deriving from
| their digital nature.
|
| It is also disappointing how academic publishers seem to view
| technology primarily as a means of extracting more money from
| students and universities.
| goatcode wrote:
| That's a pretty long rant to not have any mention of the reasons
| for which the removal was done, nor to have any mention of what
| was tried in attempt to find those reasons out.
| tarakat wrote:
| This would be impossible with paper. Digitization enables so much
| business innovation.
| hedora wrote:
| Governments should legalize format shifting for books.
|
| The libraries could scan textbooks when this happened, and make
| sure that they have one physical textbook per concurrent reader
| of the resulting file.
|
| (Of course, they'd only bother if doing so was less onerous than
| using the publisher's service.)
| yablak wrote:
| They should link to libgen.
| DanBC wrote:
| full title is "Irish Librarians condemn publisher Wiley's removal
| of hundreds of titles from ebook collections" which does not fit
| into the title.
|
| If you can think of a better title than the one submitted you
| should email hn and ask them to change it.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| I believe the submitter can change titles of the submission
| here. There's an edit link in the links under the title. Not
| sure how long it's active for.
|
| (for what it's worth, I think it's fine as is)
| bombcar wrote:
| That is the submitter but the full title doesn't fit (whether
| HN should increase the size of the database field allocated
| for the title is left to dang).
|
| I personally would have replaced "titles" with "ebooks".
| WalterBright wrote:
| Some magazines enable you to "buy" digital versions that are only
| readable with a special app.
|
| LOL, no way am I "buying" that.
| anon_123g987 wrote:
| Pay with an NFT!
|
| https://27bslash6.com/overdue.html
| smegsicle wrote:
| at least you can usually 'buy' them from libgen
| golem14 wrote:
| as long as the price is right ...
| JohnFen wrote:
| This is another example of why eBooks cannot be considered
| anything more than temporary.
| user3939382 wrote:
| For exactly this reason (TFA) I have a private DRM-free epub
| collection with nice metadata and high-res covers that can be
| backed up and copied as I like. It contains (for my pace) years
| or maybe decades of reading material.
| blooalien wrote:
| The important key there bein' "DRM-free" ... The file format
| (epup, pdf, plaintext, whatever) doesn't matter quite as much
| as that particular detail, as long as the file format is one
| that doesn't require a proprietary reader. If I can't buy a
| book in a _lasting_ and _reliable_ (cross-platform-friendly)
| file format, then I 'm not buyin' it. (Your choice of epub is
| certainly an especially good option to go with in that
| regard.)
| WalterBright wrote:
| Right. If I can't buy the ebook as a pdf, I'm not buying it.
| Tagbert wrote:
| get it in epub if you can. PDF is a crappy, frozen format
| unless you need the specific layout control it brings.
| [deleted]
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Just use libgen?
| xtracto wrote:
| I maintain a small list of content killed by DRM on reddit at
| r/drmgraveyard . I get some kind of Schadenfreude when reading
| these types of news. DRM sucks, and I believe society should be
| enforcing waaaay stronger rules to prevent companies from
| sticking the "SELL" or "BUY" terms to the crap they currently
| offer for digital content.
|
| I bought a copy of Dungeon Keeper back in the day when it came
| out (bough it physically in the store) and I still can play it 25
| years later. That is a product SOLD, unlike most of current crap
| (kudos to GOG and websites that sell .EPUBs)
| nwsm wrote:
| I came here thinking this was about the grime rapper Wiley[0]
| whose music has largely been removed from platforms like Spotify.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiley_(musician)
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(page generated 2022-09-21 23:01 UTC)