Pirated Books

Posted on February 19, 2009
Filed Under Philosophy, Politics, Science, Tech | 3 Comments

The problem of scholarly books being scanned and posted online. I confess I’ve downloaded a few of these – but only ones out of print. (HT: Brooks Blog) That said the scholarly book industry is about the only industry worse than the recording industry. Authors get basically nothing. And most books are priced for libraries. (i.e. $80+) The business needs to change, but like the scholarly journal industry, there has been considerably resistance to change.

One can certainly defend the movie industry and recording industry in defending their model. While I think both industries are idiots, it’s clearly just entertainment and a business. The problem with scholarly journals and presses is that it is supposed to be about academics. There just isn’t the justification for limiting access and charging ridiculous fees.

As I’ve oft mentioned physics completely changed years ago by putting pretty much every paper online months before it is published. I think this helped physics tremendously. Other disciplines to varying degrees of success have done the same.

However the scholarly book presses really don’t want this. So you don’t find, for instance, lower priced e-book versions. In other words they explicitly design things so you can only read in libraries the hard copy. They don’t even want you to buy their books. (Otherwise why would so many books be priced above $100?) Further while many point out that recording artists don’t exactly rake up much from sales, with book authors it is even worse. I’ve a lot of friends who have published books. The amounts they say they earn are ridiculous.

As they say, evolve or die…

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Comments

3 Responses to “Pirated Books”

I agree with your rant. Most scholars I know don’t even own more than a copy or two of their own books because they can’t afford them either. Is it really so hard to create an affordable and reputable scholarly e-press?

Agreed!

Gideon Burton is posting some interesting stuff on this over at Academic Evolution: http://www.academicevolution.com/

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