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© Copyright 2000, Jim Loy
It's back! After more than a year's absence, MathWorld is back on the WWW. But CRC continues to cause problems. They continue to not advertise their book, and blame the WWW page for lost sales.
Eric W. Weisstein's MathWorld, one of the biggest WWW sites, and certainly one of the best, is in a bizarre kind of limbo. The story is chilling, and puzzling. This site was a huge collection, tens of thousands of articles, of mathematics. It was built up over a dozen or so years, coming online in 1995. Then, in 1999, CRC published a book version (the huge CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics, by Eric W. Weisstein) of the WWW page, and now is suing Weisstein for copyright infringement (for maintaining the WWW version). It sounds stupid to me. They are shooting themselves in both feet.
The WWW version may indeed hurt sales of the encyclopedia. Why buy it, at $100, when you can get the same info on the WWW? Well, it's a handy book. I bought it. But if I'd known that they were a bunch of money-hungry jerks, I might not have bought it. I think they are sending a message to scientific authors: Don't let the publishers have the copyright. And so, publishers and authors will suffer, because of mistrust.
MathWorld is currently off the WWW, by court order. I assume that it will be back, and that CRC will lose their lawsuit. After all, MathWorld was on the WWW four years before it was in a book. And they are going to lose authors, and readers, and money. It is a shame.