There are about 3,000 academic fields [1], give or take. US† could easily afford to spend 1,000,000 USD per year for a new/updated textbook in each field (absol

There are about 3,000 academic fields [1], give or take. US† could easily afford to spend 1,000,000 USD per year for a new/updated textbook in each field (absolutely overkill as many fields overlap) and it would barely be $3 billion per year: that's ~0.17% of the $1.73 trillion DOD budget for FY2023 [2]. We are keeping knowledge in chains in order for some parasitic losers to make 1 to 7 billion USD revenue per year [3]. And they are parasitic losers because (i) they prey on the authors (the authors can get even under 10% [4]), and (ii) they are capitalistically inefficient (under 10 billion USD per year is a rounding error for Apple and the likes). † although it could be a worldwide effort. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_fields https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_fields [2] https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=2023 https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=... [3] https://www.tckpublishing.com/top-publishers-by-revenue https://www.tckpublishing.com/top-publishers-by-revenue [4] https://bookriot.com/how-much-do-authors-make-per-book https://bookriot.com/how-much-do-authors-make-per-book