4 ms·

Many of the books I am interested in have actually been financed by tax payers, because their authors are professors. These days publishers are not adding much

Many of the books I am interested in have actually been financed by tax payers, because their authors are professors. These days publishers are not adding much value here, actually they often make high quality publishing harder by terrible off-shore handling of LaTeX. I've bought quite a few ebooks from the AMS (American Mathematical Society), just to get very angry about the annoying small print on the bottom of EVERY FREAKING PAGE stating that I am the owner of this book. I don't feel bad about replacing these damaged goods with the real deal.

gnramires 4y ago
Not only that, but many publishers, specifically scientific ones, seem to get in the way of the natural near-0 marginal cost of digital publishing. Information should be available to all by default, because the value of having it freely available is much more than even what people could be expected to individually all pay for it. In the end, having a million paywalls and restricting information for disadvantaged individuals is not rational (or ethical), or effective for a society.