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The argument in publishing industry (about papers and textbooks) is that if you cannot afford to buy/rent at the current market value then you still can use a p

The argument in publishing industry (about papers and textbooks) is that if you cannot afford to buy/rent at the current market value then you still can use a public/university library to get it. This became actually more of a cliché than an argument over time. Now with a significant portion of textbooks (and books in general) become mainly E-books, the industry limited library capabilities and required pay per lend and restrict number of simultaneous lends. For papers, many universities canceled access contracts because it became too costly. Not to mention that smaller universities couldn't afford most of these subscriptions anyway. Publishing industry really needs more regulation. Free market hardly work there.

beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
If I buy an ebook, can I give it "used" to a library? I would like to, but I don't even know if that's a thing. (Let's assume for the sake of the question that the book I buy is also DRM free.)
- CuriousCosmic 3y ago
  For textbooks? No. And nowadays a lot of them also expire after a year since by then the student likely no longer needs it. It's a really gross industry
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I would question that you don't need a university textbook after a year. I can't say I remember specific examples but I'm pretty sure I referred to earlier textbooks for later engineering classes.
    - bluish29 3y ago
      I still refer to my undergrad textbooks in maths and physics till this day. There are usually the basics and you need to review them a lot if you are working in STEM fields.
- harshreality 3y ago
  In theory, maybe. In practice, no. In theory, a publisher could sell you an ebook, declare that you own it and can transfer it (like a digital right of first sale) as long as you don't keep a copy. In practice, it would be a hassle for libraries to verify that permission, so even if you had such a book, they might say thanks but no thanks. Essentially all ebooks are sold under license that each book is for your use only, and no transfers are allowed. Because ebooks are licensed, and not sold complete with a right of first sale, retailers can set whatever conditions they want depending on who they sell to, and the market can't arbitrage. That's why libraries have to pay more for an ebook they're allowed to lend 10 times than you have to pay for the same ebook on Amazon.
- miah_ 3y ago
  Its very rare that "buying" a ebook results in you "owning" the copy you bought, at best its a rental. A physical book though, if you are holding it in your hands, you own it.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
Yeah, surprised (not surprised?) to see the used-textbook market seemingly gone now when I was recently visiting my daughter at the University of Kansas. It used to be a small industry that nonetheless allowed a brick and mortar store to thrive as a secondary bookstore to the university's student union. Never mind the savings for students.
- bluish29 3y ago
  Even with paper textbooks, publishers will now provide online assignments (which is convenient for universities) and other online materials which you will not be able to sell (it will expire) with the book. So they force students to buy new textbook for each class.
  - samtho 3y ago
    This is classic rent seeking behavior. The more insidious aspect is that this is foisted upon a captive audience of kids/young adults that agreed to tens of thousands in non-dischargable debt when they turned 18.
    - tacocataco 3y ago
      Didn't the kids go into debt to learn how the world really works? This is how we are. For now.
  - dghlsakjg 3y ago
    The crazy thing to me is that for a lot of the classes that use these online materials, nothing has changed in 50 years. 100-300 classes are largely the same as they were before digital learning. The problem from a broader point of view is a coordination problem. The people making the buying decisions (professors and departments) are not the people paying (the students). I would wholeheartedly support legislation that forced professors to pay the same textbook fees as their students, and for departments to be required to cover the costs for scholarship students. I’ll bet we would see a lot more schools opting into open source textbooks and articles from the library if that were the case.
llm_trw 3y ago
>Free market hardly work there. You literally have a government granted monopoly on producing books. How can you even bring in the free market into this?
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  I mean, the free market is working pretty well. http://libgen.rs/ http://libgen.rs/ The government-granted monopoly, not so much.
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > I mean, the free market is working pretty well. > http://libgen.rs/ http://libgen.rs/ Exactly. What a lot of economists tend to "forget" is that markets also include black/illegal markets and markets that are hardly controllable by the government.
    - j_maffe 3y ago
      Unfortunately many are misled to believe that pirating books published by cartels is unethical.
      - c0pium 3y ago
        Please explain your alternative mechanism for compensating the author for their work.
        j_maffe 3y ago
        I'm not proposing an alternative mechanism. I think people who can comfortably afford to pay the asked price for a book should of course do just that. On the other hand, for the billions of those who do not have that privilege, I wholeheartedly recommend piracy. It is of no cost to the author/publisher (since they weren't going to pay anyway) and of tremendous positive impact for equality and social mobility for the community. In a perfect world piracy would be an unfair and unnecessary venture. In this one, for many people it is absolutely justified.
snapplebobapple 3y ago
Its actually an argument for less regulation. Its the regulation causing the market failure. Cut copyright to a less stupid number like what it was originally 14 years. Make maintaining a copyright for those years contingent on having X % of sales available for free in libraries. We are asking the fundamentally wrong question with copyright, we should not be maximizing monopoly for copyright owners, we should be minimizing market disruption to get a chosen amount of extra creative production
- ses1984 3y ago
  >Cut copyright to a less stupid number like what it was originally 14 years. Make maintaining a copyright for those years contingent on having X % of sales available for free in libraries I’m nitpicking but this isn’t less regulation, it’s different regulation. Some would even say it’s more. You’re reducing a number but adding complexity with the percent sales requirement.
  - patcon 3y ago
    Some regulation liberates closures, and some protects closures. I believe the person is advocating for less regulation that protects private closures, and is throwing in the idea of more regulation to liberate closures... perhaps as a way to repair the damage caused by the closure. Maybe I'm assuming too much tho...! I appreciate your comment regardless :)
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    Plus, if you got rid of or reduced copyright, publishers would just find other ways to engage in cartel-like behavior and continue to screw everyone. I can’t think of any case where regulation/government was reduced and companies responded with something less profitable for the company.
    - Retric 3y ago
      Airlines are often brought up as becoming cheaper with less regulations. While it was mostly manufacturers building more efficient aircraft, people are generally willing to trade leg room for a cheaper fair. That’s exactly the kind of thing regulators and the free market may come to a different compromise. Worse, but cheaper is often quite appealing.
karaterobot 3y ago
> Now with a significant portion of textbooks (and books in general) become mainly E-books I don't know about textbooks, but the overall share of publishing industry revenue that comes from ebooks is really low. Something like 7%, and falling steadily. I had assumed it was much larger. https://wordsrated.com/ebooks-sales-statistics/ https://wordsrated.com/ebooks-sales-statistics/
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
I've never actually heard that argument, must have been invented by the highway robbery textbook market since I was in college. Piracy is seemingly the only bulwark against publisher abuses functionally. With that horrid multi-century copyright ruling, there won't be any free market in specific publications within living human lifetimes. Libraries don't have the political power to do anything. In the video game space, piracy has been responsible for the only preservation done, and arguably enabled the market for remasters and releases on new platforms. The ebook publishers will probably start encountering AI that is way better at OCR and scan cleanup. Imagine an AI that you simply run on a camera looking at a screen and you fast forward through a book at 10 pages per second: the AI picks it all up, scans it, possibly detecting layout and images.
- ghaff 3y ago
  There are consumer-priced scanners that are already pretty good at supporting de-warping and OCR. (Glossy pages work less well.) I'm surprised I haven't seen a better iPhone app--at least one without a subscription fee. But we're definitely very close.
Vaslo 3y ago
Free market works fine. You are welcome to write and release any book you want at whatever cost you want. Authors require lots of money, support costs to create, illustrate, bundle, bind, and ship books. And they won’t waste their time doing that without a profit. Lots of people work for and support those companies and it’s getting more expensive as minimum wages increase. You are just reacting to this because “free for me”. What industry do you work in? I want to see you backpeddle or try and explain in your response when I say the same about your “product” needing regulation.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  Why do you bring up the authors like they're the primary ones being harmed? Most aren't making money to begin with because they get such a small piece of the pie. A typical contract might see them get 20-40% of the cut if they do the distribution and marketing themselves. The vast majority of authors are not professional writers as a result, it's just a side gig on top of other jobs. Authors also can't set their own prices (publishers and marketplaces have a big say) and depending on the terms, they may not get any meaningful royalties. This is common in academic publishing for example.
bsdpufferfish 3y ago
> Free market hardly work there. This is hardly a free market. Libraries receive a budget to spend _ dollars on books every year. This entire publishing industry exists to capture that cashflow, because consumers aren't buying it with their own money. The university version is more complex, but the bottom line is you do not have consumers spending their money on products they use.
14 3y ago
For now I will teach my kids to pirate. Not the best solution because honestly I did pirate when I was poor then honestly tried to move away from those days and got a Netflix account and Amazon prime account but the amazon movie site is just so horrible. Every movie I click it wants me to buy or rent. I never did figure out a way to filter those from not showing up I don’t know if that has changed but I ditched it. Then Netflix disabled the account sharing and I argue I wasn’t really sharing I bought Netflix for my kids to use and I am divorced so that means at 2 different locations. It worked for a bit but now seems to detect the location change and I just said screw it and canceled. It was much more convenient to just pirate which was and still is so easy even my kids know how to find the shows they want. And when they get to university I imagine I will show them how to access text books and articles for free. Sad state of affairs as I really do want to contribute my fair share but not when it is pay hundreds of dollars for a new revision of a text book that didn’t add any new context but simply rearranged the pages a bit so they can call it an new version. In the end the publishers are the problem no piracy so I do not feel bad one bit.
ozim 3y ago
Not trying to throw a straw man argument, but from what I understand in that space is that there is no free market there. If you want to publish so it is read by anyone you can only go to big ones - if you are not publishing with big ones, good luck no one will read it.
briandear 3y ago
Free market needs to be allowed to work. If enough universities cancel contracts, then publishers will have to adjust right? Why are we going to ask government to regulate publishing? Everything else they regulate/manipulate gets far more expensive. Health care for instance. Housing (especially in rent control cities.) Education. Transportation (note with deregulation of air travel, flying places became significantly more affordable.
EvkoGS 3y ago
>Free market hardly work there. Lmao, what? I download most of books and documents from Z-library (donated several times), that's the free market. Btw, FBI seized all of their domains recently. Most of the time I need that one medicine textbook on a narrow subject, costing $100+, which I'd use just to look something up. I'm not going to buy all these books under any condition.
WalterBright 3y ago
> Free market hardly work there. Buying things with taxpayer funding and legal mandates is not free market.
- ta988 3y ago
  yep so is buying back bank, mortgage and insurance companies
miki123211 3y ago
> Publishing industry really needs more regulation. Free market hardly work there. Most of these problems wouldn't exist if not for copyright law, which is nothing but regulation. You can either fix the problems by introducing more regulation for publishers or by lessening the regulatory restrictions on libraries. Make it legal for them to break DRM (and discuss / purchase / commission DRM-breaking tools), offer scans of physical books to more than one person at a time etc, and your problem is gone.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
Copyright owners are monopolists. Of course the free market doesn't work: the government grants them a functionally eternal monopoy on what's essentially numbers. Copyright must be abolished or we'll never move forward as a species.

beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago

If I buy an ebook, can I give it "used" to a library? I would like to, but I don't even know if that's a thing. (Let's assume for the sake of the question that the book I buy is also DRM free.)

CuriousCosmic 3y ago
For textbooks? No. And nowadays a lot of them also expire after a year since by then the student likely no longer needs it. It's a really gross industry
- ghaff 3y ago
  I would question that you don't need a university textbook after a year. I can't say I remember specific examples but I'm pretty sure I referred to earlier textbooks for later engineering classes.
  - bluish29 3y ago
    I still refer to my undergrad textbooks in maths and physics till this day. There are usually the basics and you need to review them a lot if you are working in STEM fields.
harshreality 3y ago
In theory, maybe. In practice, no. In theory, a publisher could sell you an ebook, declare that you own it and can transfer it (like a digital right of first sale) as long as you don't keep a copy. In practice, it would be a hassle for libraries to verify that permission, so even if you had such a book, they might say thanks but no thanks. Essentially all ebooks are sold under license that each book is for your use only, and no transfers are allowed. Because ebooks are licensed, and not sold complete with a right of first sale, retailers can set whatever conditions they want depending on who they sell to, and the market can't arbitrage. That's why libraries have to pay more for an ebook they're allowed to lend 10 times than you have to pay for the same ebook on Amazon.
miah_ 3y ago
Its very rare that "buying" a ebook results in you "owning" the copy you bought, at best its a rental. A physical book though, if you are holding it in your hands, you own it.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

Yeah, surprised (not surprised?) to see the used-textbook market seemingly gone now when I was recently visiting my daughter at the University of Kansas. It used to be a small industry that nonetheless allowed a brick and mortar store to thrive as a secondary bookstore to the university's student union. Never mind the savings for students.

bluish29 3y ago
Even with paper textbooks, publishers will now provide online assignments (which is convenient for universities) and other online materials which you will not be able to sell (it will expire) with the book. So they force students to buy new textbook for each class.
- samtho 3y ago
  This is classic rent seeking behavior. The more insidious aspect is that this is foisted upon a captive audience of kids/young adults that agreed to tens of thousands in non-dischargable debt when they turned 18.
  - tacocataco 3y ago
    Didn't the kids go into debt to learn how the world really works? This is how we are. For now.
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  The crazy thing to me is that for a lot of the classes that use these online materials, nothing has changed in 50 years. 100-300 classes are largely the same as they were before digital learning. The problem from a broader point of view is a coordination problem. The people making the buying decisions (professors and departments) are not the people paying (the students). I would wholeheartedly support legislation that forced professors to pay the same textbook fees as their students, and for departments to be required to cover the costs for scholarship students. I’ll bet we would see a lot more schools opting into open source textbooks and articles from the library if that were the case.

llm_trw 3y ago

>Free market hardly work there. You literally have a government granted monopoly on producing books. How can you even bring in the free market into this?

thaumasiotes 3y ago
I mean, the free market is working pretty well. http://libgen.rs/ http://libgen.rs/ The government-granted monopoly, not so much.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > I mean, the free market is working pretty well. > http://libgen.rs/ http://libgen.rs/ Exactly. What a lot of economists tend to "forget" is that markets also include black/illegal markets and markets that are hardly controllable by the government.
  - j_maffe 3y ago
    Unfortunately many are misled to believe that pirating books published by cartels is unethical.
    - c0pium 3y ago
      Please explain your alternative mechanism for compensating the author for their work.
      - j_maffe 3y ago
        I'm not proposing an alternative mechanism. I think people who can comfortably afford to pay the asked price for a book should of course do just that. On the other hand, for the billions of those who do not have that privilege, I wholeheartedly recommend piracy. It is of no cost to the author/publisher (since they weren't going to pay anyway) and of tremendous positive impact for equality and social mobility for the community. In a perfect world piracy would be an unfair and unnecessary venture. In this one, for many people it is absolutely justified.

snapplebobapple 3y ago

Its actually an argument for less regulation. Its the regulation causing the market failure. Cut copyright to a less stupid number like what it was originally 14 years. Make maintaining a copyright for those years contingent on having X % of sales available for free in libraries. We are asking the fundamentally wrong question with copyright, we should not be maximizing monopoly for copyright owners, we should be minimizing market disruption to get a chosen amount of extra creative production

ses1984 3y ago
>Cut copyright to a less stupid number like what it was originally 14 years. Make maintaining a copyright for those years contingent on having X % of sales available for free in libraries I’m nitpicking but this isn’t less regulation, it’s different regulation. Some would even say it’s more. You’re reducing a number but adding complexity with the percent sales requirement.
- patcon 3y ago
  Some regulation liberates closures, and some protects closures. I believe the person is advocating for less regulation that protects private closures, and is throwing in the idea of more regulation to liberate closures... perhaps as a way to repair the damage caused by the closure. Maybe I'm assuming too much tho...! I appreciate your comment regardless :)
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Plus, if you got rid of or reduced copyright, publishers would just find other ways to engage in cartel-like behavior and continue to screw everyone. I can’t think of any case where regulation/government was reduced and companies responded with something less profitable for the company.
  - Retric 3y ago
    Airlines are often brought up as becoming cheaper with less regulations. While it was mostly manufacturers building more efficient aircraft, people are generally willing to trade leg room for a cheaper fair. That’s exactly the kind of thing regulators and the free market may come to a different compromise. Worse, but cheaper is often quite appealing.

karaterobot 3y ago

> Now with a significant portion of textbooks (and books in general) become mainly E-books I don't know about textbooks, but the overall share of publishing industry revenue that comes from ebooks is really low. Something like 7%, and falling steadily. I had assumed it was much larger. https://wordsrated.com/ebooks-sales-statistics/ https://wordsrated.com/ebooks-sales-statistics/

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

I've never actually heard that argument, must have been invented by the highway robbery textbook market since I was in college. Piracy is seemingly the only bulwark against publisher abuses functionally. With that horrid multi-century copyright ruling, there won't be any free market in specific publications within living human lifetimes. Libraries don't have the political power to do anything. In the video game space, piracy has been responsible for the only preservation done, and arguably enabled the market for remasters and releases on new platforms. The ebook publishers will probably start encountering AI that is way better at OCR and scan cleanup. Imagine an AI that you simply run on a camera looking at a screen and you fast forward through a book at 10 pages per second: the AI picks it all up, scans it, possibly detecting layout and images.

ghaff 3y ago
There are consumer-priced scanners that are already pretty good at supporting de-warping and OCR. (Glossy pages work less well.) I'm surprised I haven't seen a better iPhone app--at least one without a subscription fee. But we're definitely very close.

Vaslo 3y ago

Free market works fine. You are welcome to write and release any book you want at whatever cost you want. Authors require lots of money, support costs to create, illustrate, bundle, bind, and ship books. And they won’t waste their time doing that without a profit. Lots of people work for and support those companies and it’s getting more expensive as minimum wages increase. You are just reacting to this because “free for me”. What industry do you work in? I want to see you backpeddle or try and explain in your response when I say the same about your “product” needing regulation.

AlotOfReading 3y ago
Why do you bring up the authors like they're the primary ones being harmed? Most aren't making money to begin with because they get such a small piece of the pie. A typical contract might see them get 20-40% of the cut if they do the distribution and marketing themselves. The vast majority of authors are not professional writers as a result, it's just a side gig on top of other jobs. Authors also can't set their own prices (publishers and marketplaces have a big say) and depending on the terms, they may not get any meaningful royalties. This is common in academic publishing for example.

bsdpufferfish 3y ago

> Free market hardly work there. This is hardly a free market. Libraries receive a budget to spend _ dollars on books every year. This entire publishing industry exists to capture that cashflow, because consumers aren't buying it with their own money. The university version is more complex, but the bottom line is you do not have consumers spending their money on products they use.

14 3y ago

For now I will teach my kids to pirate. Not the best solution because honestly I did pirate when I was poor then honestly tried to move away from those days and got a Netflix account and Amazon prime account but the amazon movie site is just so horrible. Every movie I click it wants me to buy or rent. I never did figure out a way to filter those from not showing up I don’t know if that has changed but I ditched it. Then Netflix disabled the account sharing and I argue I wasn’t really sharing I bought Netflix for my kids to use and I am divorced so that means at 2 different locations. It worked for a bit but now seems to detect the location change and I just said screw it and canceled. It was much more convenient to just pirate which was and still is so easy even my kids know how to find the shows they want. And when they get to university I imagine I will show them how to access text books and articles for free. Sad state of affairs as I really do want to contribute my fair share but not when it is pay hundreds of dollars for a new revision of a text book that didn’t add any new context but simply rearranged the pages a bit so they can call it an new version. In the end the publishers are the problem no piracy so I do not feel bad one bit.

ozim 3y ago

Not trying to throw a straw man argument, but from what I understand in that space is that there is no free market there. If you want to publish so it is read by anyone you can only go to big ones - if you are not publishing with big ones, good luck no one will read it.

briandear 3y ago

Free market needs to be allowed to work. If enough universities cancel contracts, then publishers will have to adjust right? Why are we going to ask government to regulate publishing? Everything else they regulate/manipulate gets far more expensive. Health care for instance. Housing (especially in rent control cities.) Education. Transportation (note with deregulation of air travel, flying places became significantly more affordable.

EvkoGS 3y ago

>Free market hardly work there. Lmao, what? I download most of books and documents from Z-library (donated several times), that's the free market. Btw, FBI seized all of their domains recently. Most of the time I need that one medicine textbook on a narrow subject, costing $100+, which I'd use just to look something up. I'm not going to buy all these books under any condition.

WalterBright 3y ago

> Free market hardly work there. Buying things with taxpayer funding and legal mandates is not free market.

ta988 3y ago
yep so is buying back bank, mortgage and insurance companies

miki123211 3y ago

> Publishing industry really needs more regulation. Free market hardly work there. Most of these problems wouldn't exist if not for copyright law, which is nothing but regulation. You can either fix the problems by introducing more regulation for publishers or by lessening the regulatory restrictions on libraries. Make it legal for them to break DRM (and discuss / purchase / commission DRM-breaking tools), offer scans of physical books to more than one person at a time etc, and your problem is gone.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

Copyright owners are monopolists. Of course the free market doesn't work: the government grants them a functionally eternal monopoy on what's essentially numbers. Copyright must be abolished or we'll never move forward as a species.