[plt-scheme] online version of _The Little Schemer_?

From: Benjamin L. Russell (dekudekuplex at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Dec 21 02:54:08 EST 2007

Aha!  This would seem to explain why some computer
science-related books with relatively high sales, such
as _The Little Schemer,_ are so hard to find online: 
Perhaps the publisher is afraid of losing sales.

However, this then doesn't explain why one of the
granddaddies of such books, _SICP,_ is available
freely online, even though it is being published from
a major publisher.  What I can't understand is why
_SICP_ is available for free online, while _The Little
Schemer_, published by the same publisher, is not.

Perhaps _SICP_ is a special case?  Other course books
from the same publisher for other MIT OpenCourseWare
courses are not necessarily freely available online.

Benjamin L. Russell

--- Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk at cs.brown.edu> wrote:

> >  Side question-- I've noticed that for cookbooks
> (and other
> >  categories of books) which I own, the copyright
> is held by the
> >  *author*, not the publisher. In contrast, for
> programming language
> >  books in my collection, the publisher is almost
> always the copyright
> >  owner. (The one exception that I noticed in a
> quick perusal of my
> >  library tonight is Queinnec's Lisp in Small
> Pieces, where Queinnec
> >  is apparently owner of the copyright for the
> original French text, but
> >  Cambridge owns the copyright for the English
> language edition.) Just
> >  curious: why is the copyright for CS books owned
> by the publisher,
> >  rather than the author(s)?
> 
> That's how all contemporary publishing works.  The
> right question is,
> "Why does ownership of cookbooks seem to reside with
> the author rather
> than the publisher?"
> 
> Authors who don't like forking ownership over to
> publishers have
> limited choices.  This is why PLAI is
> self-published.
> 
> Shriram
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