Quote:
Originally Posted by Difflugia
It looks to me like unglue.it just wants to be a middle man with a minimum of work and liability. They have some process (that isn't described) for vetting rights holders intended to legally constitute due-diligence, but other than that, it's the owners of the works that provide most of the effort involved. One question in the FAQ struck me as particularly humorous:
Looking at the books available, I'm betting that most (if not all) are legitimate
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Thanks.
Open Acess stuff can get very complicated. I'm glad that I don't have to know more about the "ins and outs" of OA than I do. My interest is almost solely in how I can get some _free_ high-quality ebooks in my areas of interest, like religion; I don't have to know the workings of OA very much to do that.
If I was an author having recently completed a book, I would want to know far more about the ins and outs of OA than I do.
One thing that is really hard to understand is why so many authors "sign on" to OA. There are an _enormous_ amount of OA ebooks out there, not even considering academic journals and "papers" that are OA, which are are very sizeable, too. Authors surrender rights; do much of the work that a traditional publisher would be doing if they had gone that route (your quote from unglue.it's FAQ was funny, although I'm sure that the person at unglue.it who wrote it didn't intend for it to be!); never will get any (direct, at least), profits, and have to pay some, if not all, of the publishing costs! OA publishers often have webpages devoted to selling authors on the benefits of going the OA route. The only advantage that I can see to an author (although, admittedly, I never have read completely any of the OA publishers' sales pitches) is publicity for the author.
On a slightly differ topic, some of you may wonder why I post unglue.it's OA books so much, compared to the gazillions of other ones that I could be posting. I think that it is because I like the "deal of the day" specials. And, while unglue.it's newly unglued books don't come out at anywhere close to a daily rate, and they come out unpredictably, it's kind of the same thing, right?
