MacMillan book reps just made a big sales pitch at my school for a new textbook. The book is pretty good, but it has a lot of useful features intended to torpedo the used-book/book rental market. There’s some good to be said about that… BUT they kept going on about how they’re a family-owned business. But, like Nature, they’re a subsidiary of Holtzbrinck. The same guys who made TOR stop selling no-DRM ebooks for a while. The siblings who own Holzbrinck (the brother would be a count if Germany still recognized those titles) are billionaires, and Holtzbrinck brings in close to two billion Euro a year. And Holtzbrinck has been throwing newspapers under the bus one after another.
I got pretty riled-up during the book pitch, and it lasted over an hour. I probably need to go on heart meds now. The above was some of the rant I held back during the meeting. Is there such a thing as "angry googling’?
