[FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

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Nick has asked us to consider ways in which society, given its current structure including sci-hub and libgen, peer network theft, "late stage" capitalism (including things like Amazon and the gig economy), the decline of universities, youtube, and everything else, might *facilitate* non-credentialed, paid, authorship ... or more generally intellectual work outside academia. I don't have any kind of response, yet. But given that question and your calling out libgen (and its use) as an ethical question *and* given your description that the creators aren't paid much as things are, I'd like to know how you (and everyone else) parse things like Aaron Schwartz' Open Access Manfesto, the FAIR principles, CopyLeft, etc.

It strikes me one could decide using libgen is ethically necessary, or at least virtuous.

I don't think that. But I have a friend who comes close. He hosted Game of Thrones nights at his house, attended by several of their friends [†]. Early on, he stole the episodes with Torrent. When that dried up, they shared a single Netflix login so all of them (maybe 10 or so) could watch while minimizing the cost. And every single one of these households pulls in >$100k per year. There's literally zero financial reason to go to such extents to steal that sort of content ... *except* if they believe they're "justified" or "right" in doing so.

So, if the existence of, contribution to, and use of libgen is an ethical question, do you think someone who decides they *should* participate in the project has made a reasonable ethical choice?


[†] I still wonder why they never invited us to their GoT parties. >8^D

On 7/5/20 4:47 PM, Edward Angel wrote:
> Consequently, the holders of the copyright have no protection at all other than some people having ethical issues with libgen. Sadly, I find many of my colleagues and students do not see this as an ethical issue. 

On 7/6/20 4:04 PM, Edward Angel wrote:
> You are just touching the surface of how authors are not making profits.
> 
> If a book is sold in a college bookstore (all of which rip off students) I get my contractual royalties (18% of net which is about 80% of gross). Sounds good but then there are a number of side deals (my six monthly royalty statement is over 20 pages long). 
> 
> Net from an Amazon sales is almost nothing.
> 
> Any international sales reduce any royalty by 50%. An Amazon sale in India or China nets me almost nothing.
> 
> But it gets worse.
> 
> There is an International Edition which is handled through Pearson in Hong Kong. To avoid  possible copyright issues they get the tex files from Pearson USA and change some of the exercises such that the pagination is exactly the same. The changed problems are idiotic and I believe violate my contract. The best I could do for the new edition is get a clause in my contract that forces them to take my name off a version if they make changes I don’t approve.
> 
> But there’s more.
> 
> Pearson HK competes with Pearson US and other Pearson subsidiaries, So they can offer a lower cost International version on the web to US students. So not only are my royalties reduced by over 50% but Pearson HK is said to be doing well and Pearson US and my editor are not even though they and he did all the work. (he’s not longer with the company).
> 
> And finally there’s China. Pearson sells the rights to China for a few thousand dollars, of which I get a small piece, and China can then print as many Chinese copies as they like. When I questioned management about what appeared to me to be a ridiculous deal, the answer was that if they asked for more, the Chinese would simply copy it for free.


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