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So, this guy has made a bunch of eBooks based on Stack Exchange content. Making books of SE stuff is okay, but two rules need to be followed:

  • Attribution
  • License the work under CC-BY-SA as well

This link claims that the books do attribute properly. I find it unlikely that he has properly licensed the books under CC-BY-SA though, given that he's selling them as eBooks. It's possible, but it's dubious (why do people buy them if they can get them for free?)

Could someone investigate. CC-BY-SA is important, it what keeps things open.

Again, I'm fine with him selling books, but not violating creative commons.

(P.S. The other problem I have with it is the covers are really bad.)

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    From the free samples, I can see proper attributions, but no license statement, and no clear mention of the fact that the content was not written by the book's putative author. There's a “Copyright” section which isn't included in the free samples and looks like it could include the requisite license statement; if anyone has an Amazon Kindle unlimited subscription, they can download some of those books. At the very least, the fact that the “About this book” section makes no reference to the content not being written by the book's putative author is misleading, but I'm not sure if it's illegal. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Feb 3 '16 at 13:12
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The book does explicitly link to the Creative Commons license, as well as the attribution requirements on our blog, according to Amazon's little search feature.

I can't view what the exact page looks like, only that the links are there near the end of the book, without paying for it. Which I'm not going to do because I have absolutely zero concern that these books violate any of our policies. George is a respected member of our community, and not the only person who does this.

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12

I downloaded the free sample for one of the books (Kindle edition). User names and question titles link to the appropriate pages on the site, so the attribution requirements are being met. (I'm assuming that all of the books were produced the same way.) I didn't see anything about the license, but since it's a free sample I only got a small part of the book.

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    Is that free sample illegal then? – PyRulez Feb 2 '16 at 10:17
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    @PyRulez beats me. That's a service provided by Amazon for Kindle books; since it's not a complete book (in fact, they sometimes cut off mid-sentence), it might not count as a proper publication. I didn't read this sample through to the end, so I can't say that the license wasn't there, just that I didn't see it. – Monica Cellio Feb 2 '16 at 15:08
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    @PyRulez I suppose publishing a free sample for advertising purposes falls under the "fair use" concept. – Dmitry Grigoryev Apr 12 '18 at 7:35

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