Do Stack Exchange's terms and conditions allow people to publish books from Stack Exchange content?
I found a bunch of such books on Amazon by the same "author." For example, this one with content from the Writers group.
asked Jul 6, 2016 at 19:20
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1 Answer
Repackaging content from Stack Exchange sites is legal so long as you follow the requirements in the CC-BY-SA license. This specific series of books has been brought up on Meta.SE, and even before that, the company was aware of them and had no objections.
I've helped Mi Yodeya produce four cultivated collections of our material so far. I talked about that a little on Meta.SE. SE supported our efforts, including allowing us to use elements of the site design. (Note that the site design is not part of the CC-BY-SA license; you have to ask for permission for that.)
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@MonicaCellio And who gets the money from those Mi Yodeya books?– user5645Aug 19, 2016 at 20:00
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@what nobody; there's no money. We publish the digital books for free download, and for the one where we did a print run we gave them away. The goal was to spread knowledge, not make money. (We did fund-raising to pay for the print run for that one book.) Aug 19, 2016 at 20:02
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@MonicaCellio Thank's, Monica, that's nice to know. I must say that it bothers me somehow that people make money with books filled from Wikipedia or Stack Exchange, that is, with help that others have given out of generosity and altruisms, if you will.– user5645Aug 19, 2016 at 20:07
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@what yeah, but contributors know that going in. There is value in curating -- if somebody publishes a focused book drawn from a much-larger body of Q&A and does it well, that's something I'd probably pay money for (if the topic interests me, I mean). I don't understand paying money for straight dumps of what's available free online, and I wonder how many people actually do it. The bar for putting up an e-book for sale is pretty low, apparently. Aug 19, 2016 at 20:14