As an aside several dockets, bank statements etc have “retain for personal use or dispose of carefully.” I believe its to advoid sensitive personal information reaching third parties.

I’d say your first point of contact would be your consumer protection people. In NZ and Oz there are reasonable restrictions on what retailers can and can’t do, one of which is the post-sale contract (except for software, which gets a special exemption).

Why does software get a special exemption? I see no justification for such an exemption.

They may suggest you accepted these terms and conditions when you signed the publishing contract.

They would no doubt apologise for shoehorning the despatch of proof/review copies via their eBookshop and the misleading nature of ‘discount’ codes, but they are trying to keep authors’ costs down…

On further recollection, I’m thinking the attempted imposition of the extra condition might be due to some small discount that was offered by Springer (a discount code) on the purchase, due to my being a co-author of one of the papers in the book. But I don’t recall accepting any extra conditions in return for the discount: I simply pasted the discount code into a field on the order form. And there’s no mention of the discount or anything like that on the delivery note.

I have never seen a statement to the effect of *not* being able to resell a book except when free review copies are sent out to the press. This statement really puzzles me, after many years in the publishing business. Hmm.

In person it’s easy enough to return unwanted paperwork and say “I don’t want to buy this”. Some staff will refuse the sale but in my experience it’s quite uncommon. I do that because here at least it means I’m covered by the legislation rather than any contract of sale the retailer may try to impose.

But watch the various “members” schemes - those can be a way to implement the restrictions that you’re concerned about, because in order to get the members’ benefits you’re trading something… often your protection under the law. As one example, we have “flybuys” which are like credit card points but without the credit card, and what you’re selling is your privacy - the whole point of the scheme is that they sell your purchase history (and you’re breaking the T&C if you anonymise the info in any way - by lying on your application or letting someone else use your card, for instance)

Copyright simply says you can’t copy it (nor probably a few other things such as read it aloud in public).

Of course, copyright legislation is being added to all the time and varies according to jurisdiction. So, you may not actually be able to lend the book. You may even need to pay a royalty out of the profits from sale of the book.

Copyright licenses are not contracts - unless/until you decide you’d like to consummate them as such. You can ignore licenses or observe them - it’s up to you. You cannot be forced to agree to a license as contract even by dint of an action only permitted by the license - copyright infringement is always available to you as an option.

Of course, it is possible you have signed a rental agreement in order to obtain the book, which is thus not your property - despite having paid a deposit in lieu of being unable to return the renter’s property.

Obviously rental contracts cannot be disguised as sales.

So, a delivery note is not a contract, nor even if it contains specific instruction from the copyright holder can it constrain you differently from copyright. Copyright does not grant holders with legislative power. Copyright holders can only restore liberties otherwise suspended by copyright (possibly restricting those liberties to tightly defined limits and circumstances).

However, if the limitation on resale was also written on the invoice, then possibly it could be regarded as a contractual term of the sale. I’d then argue this constitutes a misrepresentation of what should have been a simple retail purchase. But it’s ambiguous enough that you’d need expensive lawyers if Springer sued you - not that they’d be that nasty of course.