This doesn't surprise me. The whole academic publishing side of things is a royal pile of shit. Glad someone is calling them up on it.<p>Recently I snagged a copy of "The Art of Electronics" for reference. This has a retail whack of about £40 here in the UK even with Amazon's smackdown and second hand value on top of it. Decided screw that and bagged a copy on eBay. What turned up was an affordable edition destined for Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India with a big warning not to sell outside those areas stamped on it.<p>I paid £5 including delivery.<p>Going back to when I did my EE degree, I paid out £340 on textbooks in one semester.<p>Ugh it's pitiful and pisses me right off.
Peter Suber's book on Open Access is really great, but I think it lacks perspectives on the use of the Open Access movement to fight bibliometrics. If you speak French I recently wrote a detailed introduction to the Open Access movement which points out the relationship between the two movements and how Open Access can help to go in the right direction wrt fighting bibliometrics. It available at <a href="http://pablo.rauzy.name/openaccess/introduction.html" rel="nofollow">http://pablo.rauzy.name/openaccess/introduction.html</a>.
I think the only people who access IEEE Xplore are though who have library subscriptions. Otherwise these per-chapter prices don't make any sense.