About the College Success Text:

This textbook is part of a collection from a publisher, that focuses on (mostly entry-level) college textbooks. From their beginning until the end of 2012, they licensed all of their books under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license, allowing anyone who so desired to copy them, give them away, or modify them, as long as they acknowledged the authors, released the copies under the same license, and didn’t do so for commercial gain. This was an unusual model, but they hoped it would work. (They sold access to additional study materials, as well as copies of books that would fit well on e-readers.)

In late 2012, they decided that the process of giving away access to their textbooks online wasn’t working, and decided to switch to a different model, requiring students to pay for access to the books starting in 2013. (At least initially, these fees ware rather cheap compared to normal textbook prices, but still not free.)

Because the books were still available under a Creative Commons license at the end of 2012, they have been downloaded to http://2012books.lardbucket.org/, and then repackaged so that they are available outside of the publisher’s website, and can be used by anyone under the terms of that original Creative Commons license.