Springer Textbooks More Than 10 Years Old Available for Free Legal Download

Re:Springer Textbooks More Than 10 Years Old Available for F... by johnloeber on Wednesday December 30, 2015 @12:34PM (#10813147)

I reached out to the folks at Springer and asked them whether the availability of 57,000 titles for free download had been some kind of accident. Here's the response I got:

> Thank you for reaching out to us. From time to time our titles may become available to the public for legal download. There is no guarantee that titles available will remain available permanently. The only titles that will remain available are titles marked as Open Access.

Thus, it sounds like what happened was an accident or publicity stunt. I expect access to remain cut off.

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Re:Springer Textbooks More Than 10 Years Old Available for F... by vive-la-liberte on Wednesday December 30, 2015 @05:05PM (#10814668)

Maybe if we wait another 10 years we'll get access to some more books. It's a shame that I didn't get a chance to download any of the books but then again I already have a backlog of other books to read so it's no great tragedy to me.

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Re:Springer Textbooks More Than 10 Years Old Available for F... by CamperBob2 on Wednesday December 30, 2015 @01:30PM (#10813447)

I don't understand this at all. Does their contract language with authors allows them to give books away at random times...?

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Re:Springer Textbooks More Than 10 Years Old Available for F... by webnrrd2k on Wednesday December 30, 2015 @01:41PM (#10813508)

I'd guess that they can do it under some sort of promotional clause in the contract, something stating that the publisher doesn't need to pay royalties for promotional copies of any book.

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