SoylentNews

Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

the announcement that Springer was giving away a very large part of their catalog did not seem all that outrageous to me [jacquesmattheij.com], how better to compete with ‘free’ than to slash the price to one that can’t be beat.

On Hacker News two threads appeared and people wiser and smarter than me observed that this was probably a mistake. I figured that an entity the size of Springer would surely not expose their catalog like this and that there must be some master plan. Still, the ‘no announcement in sight’ made it a bit more strange but who knows, the Christmas Spirit might have infected some Springer executives with a sudden flash of insight into what would be the best way in which the Springer corporation could positively affect mankind. From there it would have been a short meeting with the relevant minions in order to effect the incredible reach of the company onto the devices of pretty much every earthling with even a passing interest in science and at least one common language with the publications.

The name Springer would overnight be synonymous with ‘Good’, ‘Charitable’, ‘Favorite Company’ and so on.

But there is a small chance it would also be linked to ‘bankrupt’. And that’s why, not all that long after opening up the floodgates for voracious readers the gates were closed again and we were back to $175 for a decades old text book in pdf format.

Pre-Common Core textbooks are going to become collector's items.

Original Submission