[Taxacom] Important follow-up regarding Nabu Press, etc.

[Doug Yanega]

Geoff Read and others have pointed out that Nabu's post-1923 
publications do indeed extend beyond entomology, though there really 
don't seem to be many, and even among those, most seem to potentially 
be genuine public domain documents, OR they have archival tags 
indicating they are not copyrighted (which may or may not be 
correct). I can only conclude that they do use some sort of screening 
algorithm when they are grabbing documents from the web, and they 
apparently do exclude anything which is clearly *tagged* as 
copyrighted (if not, there would be WAY more obvious problem titles 
among their listings). While this is good to know, it doesn't resolve 
anything much - it still looks as if the entomological literature is 
taking a disproportionate "hit". As such, if the complaints Amazon 
gets prove to be strictly from entomologists, and traceable to an 
artifact NOT under Nabu's control, I doubt there is going to be any 
significant impact on their POD practices. It may just come down to 
the actions and education (i.e., word-of-mouth generating bad PR) of 
the consumers buying this stuff, and just how many suckers ARE born 
every minute. That bodes ill for this having a happy long-term 
resolution. Still, I don't regret bringing this to people's 
attention, and goodness only knows what positive repercussions there 
may yet be. But I'm not going to hold my breath.

Sincerely,
-- 

Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314        skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82