[Buddha-l] Good resource site shut down

[Christopher Fynn]

On 16/03/2012, Richard Hayes <rhayes at unm.edu> wrote:

> On Mar 16, 2012, at 1:59 AM, Christopher Fynn <chris.fynn at gmail.com> wrote:

>> Considering what academic publishers pay to their authors against the
>> prices they charge for their books - who are the real pirates?

> In 1988 I wrote a book on Dignāga that, to my astonishment, some people
> still read. It's available on Amazon for $266.83 (although a used copy can
> be snapped up for a mere $250). It was published by D. Reidel, who sold the
> rights to Kluwer, who sold the rights to Springer. All efforts to get
> permission to make an affordable Asian edition available have failed. The
> price keeps going up. I have never received as much as 1¢ in royalties
> (about which I don't care at all, since I have an adequate income from
> selling my labour to the state of New Mexico)

Hmm if Springer are using a print on demand service to print the books
they publish it will cost them maybe $15 to print one copy of your
book whenever it is ordered and another few of dollars to have it sent
out, All this is automated, So they receive a cheque for about $240
minus  Amazon's selling fee for each copy of your book sold without
having to do anything. The order is actually routed to the print-on
demand  service who print the book and send it out by mail or via
Amazon..

Publishers no longer have to keep warehouses of books, and their
titles never go out of print..

Of course they don't want to allow an affordable Asian edition -
because some of those copies
would leak back to America and Europe potentially depriving them of
some of their unearned income.

It is very easy to set up a "publishing company" this way - all you
have to do is register a company, obtain a series of ISBN numbers,
prepare PDFs of the books you publish and let the print on demand
service do the rest.  There is a small initial set-up fee for each
title.

You can of course use the same PDF file to make your Kindle / e-book
version of the book.
.
> Robin Hood may have stolen from the rich to give to the poor, but for all
> that he was still a thief. And that makes him a rather poor moral exemplar.

Ah - but, since he was giving it to them,  were the people he gave to,
taking what is not given?

Perhaps Robin Hood was a hidden  Bodhisattva taking on all the "sin"
of stealing to himself to alleviate the sufferings of the poor - .
maybe he was even removing some of King John's bad Karma as well.

He did have some sort of religious sanction (Friar Tuck)