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.
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)
This comment, and maybe an adjacent thread that mentioned Richard Stallman, have inspired me to coin the word Stallmanfreude: the mixed feeling one has when Stallman is again proven right.
If we separate Richard Stallman the human (with questionable hygiene habits and sexist/abusive behavior) from the ideas and writing of Richard Stallman the staunch free software philosopher and ideologue, I think we’d find that his philosophy has been strong, his thoughts and writings prescient, and his predictions coming true (as if mocking) in a largely comatose and helpless world.
I have learned that every human has (or has had) disgusting and unethical behaviors of different kinds (not that his behavior is to be excused). And with that background, I believe the world would be better off appreciating having Stallman’s work over the decades, rather than ignoring it altogether because of his personal actions and shortcomings.
Sad that we can't have nice things and that human lifetime has been wasted on building schemes like DRM; vindicated and maybe a little smug that you knew it was coming and most people don't think about it until it's too late; hopeful that maybe this time it will spur some change for the better.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
That’s only for those restricted by DRM. I make sure that I get DRM free copies through some means. Humankind wouldn’t have progressed to where it is now if a strict DRM-like mechanism had been invented a few thousand years ago.
And for this same reason, PDF is quite ill suited for small screens like smartphones or tablets.
I prefer ePub for the reflow of text that adapts to the screen size and allows the user to select fonts and other reading settings (like spacing, justification, etc.).
PDF is an open format with open-source software to read it (such as libpoppler). I don't see how they could become unreadable in the future, any more than JPEG could.
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.
> [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.
Wiley tweeted that they warned about the changes back in June 2020.
>We understand the concerns. We notified aggregators in June 2020 of the change in ebook availability and set Aug 31 2022 as a live date to give libraries time to find alternatives. We’re working with customers to provide access options during the transition.
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.
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”.
The whole model of every type of digital media just being a license to view for some time, never perpetual, is really concerning to me. I've had movies I've "purchased" from Amazon which are no longer visible, for example, and this move by Wiley seems to be exactly the same.
Reminds me of this quote: "You will own nothing, and you will be happy"
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.
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.