NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/sci/math/17439

Internet Message Format | 1992-12-27 | 3.7 KB

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From: [e-mail] (H. Murakami)
Newsgroups: sci.math
Subject: Re: High Prices of Math Books. I am pissed.
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 27 Dec 92 17:24:42 GMT
Sender: [e-mail]
Organization: Hokkaido Univ. However I am subject to tansei for JUNET.
Lines: 74

To: alt.books.technical,sci.math
Subject: Re: High Prices of Math Books. I am pissed.


| The paperback editions of books by McGraw-Hill are NOT for sale
| within the US/Canada.  These editions, called International
| Student Edition (ISE), are low-priced versions of the original
| for sale in certain specific regions.  The same holds for other
| publishers like Prentice-Hall, John-Wiley, Macmillan, etc.
| If you give them the ISBN # of the paperback edition and
| order the book (in the US) you will get a reply stating that
| they don't have marketing rights for the paperback edition within
| the US.  So when McGraw-Hill informed you about "paperback not
| being available" they meant "not for sale within the US."
|
| If they can sell paperback versions in the international
| market why can't it be done within the US, one might ask.
| That is a different issue altogether...
|

    The practice of selling something in high price domestically,
and in cheap at foreign should be called "dumping", and may be
called as an unfair trading.

They may say the hard cover and paper back are different,
however I mainly purchase for the content, not for the cover.

    Hiroshi Murakami
    [e-mail]

PS.
    The Western book publisher in recent years establish their
branch in Japan, and distribution of the books are dominated through
their channel. We usually find they use the currency conversion rate
around 200yens/dollar or more (the true rate is 125yen/dollars).
Even we try to order to the US book publisher directly expecting
to get the 125yen/dollar rating of the prices, what those publisher
will do to us is just ignore the order or circulate the order to
those Japanese branch which we would not want to.

The only way to escape these dirty practice is order the books
not the the publisher directly but order a book seller in USA
who is not controlled by the publishing jiants.

PS2.

The book publisher is the publisher.
Their purpose is primaly for money making.
If by raising the price will totally increase the profit,
the price will be raised.

The original purpose of the publising the books was not
to make the books as the material or good, nor for the profit of
the publisher, but the exchange or distribution of the ideas or
knowledges especially for the academic books.
If the academy is for the development of the knowledge and also
the making easy access of the knowledge, the electorical publication
should be encoraged.

The Americal Mathematical Society pushing the use of TeX.

For the evaluation of the authors, for the same quality of works,
the electorical free of charge publications (like anonymous ftp-able)
should be evaluated higher than the books which is usually not free-to-copy.
In that case, the author did not want the money by publication
but the fame, and that kind of circulations would help poors.

As the mathematics has long history, many respectable author's
copyrights of books or the papers were already expired.
I do hope those things will be available in CD-ROM like
10 dollar/CD that contains equivalent of 100 books.

Imagine Gauss's werke or Riemann's or Hilbert's , etc.. free ftp-able,
or a 10 dollar CD contains full of Burubaki's books, so on.