this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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Academic publishers are parasites.
I have been working through a textbook this week that has a copyleft statement on every page, and was written by a government scientist who did not get paid to do it. When you access it through the publisher website there is a copyright and they're charging $200 for access.
Replacing the human expert with a word-guessing machine is a logical progression in their unabashed rent seeking.
In my experience the publisher Manning Books earns their cut. They’ve done interesting books, allow early access and update books online, provide digital copies if you buy the physical, etc.
Isn't that illegal?
The content (i.e. text, tables, images, etc. ) of the book is under copyleft, while the only thing the publisher can argue that's theirs is the design (cover, font, copyright claim text, etc.) There are things like page layout and stuff that may've been created by the author or the publishers so it's in a grey area.
All in all, I think scanning the book and OCRing it, removing stuff like page numbers and those first few pages of junk would remove all "infringing" elements.
Or, as always, you can email tye author and they're 99% sure to give you their manuscript directly if they didn't publish it somewhere else already.