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Comment by jwie | Hacker News Reader

It’s so much worse than you think.

Many textbooks come with license keys specifically so you can’t buy used books anymore.

Students who do buy a used book are typically coerced into buying the license key to do digital homework, or whatever other reason.

When I was teaching during a graduate fellowship I accepted paper assignments for students who bought used books, or who shared books with other students. The Pearson representative complained and I was given a talking to by the graduate student dean about consistency or some such nonsense. Eventually I would be reassigned to teach classes that didn’t involve digital components.

We called it the textbook industrial complex.

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I'm not sure the situation calls for such diplomatic language.

You are fucking with this company's fief.

There, that's what's really going on. They feel entitled to earning money and are pissed they need any customers at all to get it.

Public libraries are now paying more money per use for licensing fees than an individual would pay. Libraries are pretty much looking into the abyss, no more permanent copies of anything. All books a rented, they all have usage limits, typically some combination of date of expiration as well as number of checkouts - they the library must pay for another license.

It's beyond absurd. I'm not at all sympathetic to this business model. Meanwhile author percentages have gone down.

Digital is dramatically worse, except for the fief holders.

Yes, this is the right issue - it's their fief.

They're farming money off the students. Don't mess with the crop, even if you are the crop.

Is this the sort of sustainable business that our governments are encouraging?

I do not think this is much of a metaphor, even. The whole paralegal system built around so-called intellectual property is conceptually analogous to the feudal system of banalités, private tolls, guild privileges and monopolies etc. abolished in the early days of the French Revolution. In the sense that it is a set of privileges invented, granted and enforced by the central state power to some private parties, allowing the latter to directly extract rent from the public.

By the way various feudal privileges were fascinating by the way in how Byzantine and random they were, of course from the modern perspective. At the end even the nobles supporting the Enlightenment were for ending them: some say also because they saw more money in free(r?) enterprise. I kind of doubt we'll live to see similar sentiment in copyright robber barons.

The move to online or digital textbooks was supposed to drastically cut prices. No paper, no printing expense, no shipping expense, no storage expense, fewer bookstore employees to pay, etc.

What actually happened is textbook publishing houses like Pearson just leveraged the digital tecnology to make duplication or resale difficult or impossible, and kept all the cost savings to themselves.

TaaS

This seems similar to a lot of "automation" concern - it helps consumers but you're still cutting a lot of jobs. I think we need a better social safety net before we can truly see the benefits of improving production chains. Otherwise you're mainly going to see people justifying existing jobs (as has historically been the case)

Why wouldn’t the dean tell them to go pound sand? Does Pearson do anything for the university except extracting money?

I did more or less. I said I’m the instructor of record I can decide how I take assignments. Next thing was “paperless” complaints. I was “using too much paper.” After a little back and forth they got tired of me, handed me a degree and told me to leave.

I think what really irked them was other students found out and started demanding it from all the real professors and adjuncts and in other contexts. Then I was an actual problem not just a troublemaker.

"Then I was an actual problem not just a troublemaker."

Maybe I'm weird, but this sounds like the highest form of compliment.

Nope. I see it the same way. Perhaps we are both weird then.

This is why we’re on “Hacker” news :)

It's the other 99% that are weird, not us.

Indeed! Well Played.

It’s also a great quote.

because that Dean is likely responsible for receiving payments - maybe not personally, but to the school - from that same business.

Or that business simply gives small preferred publishing deals to the Dean's professors. Often these professors have their own books that are required for the class (and nobody else uses these books).

You end up with books that sell < 100 copies a year that would never be published from a market demand perspective but provide extra $ for the professor (which matters to the Dean for retention and salary).

I graduated from a large state university engineering school 20 years ago and this was the case so I'm sure it's only become more "enshittified".

FYI, this has been going on since at least the 70s. Assigned text of sub-standard quality in one of my classes had been recently written by a prof at a neighboring college.

Publishers have a sales force that courts and encourages (bribes) academics and administrators. They fund conferences and provide jobs (writing textbooks).

It's a patronage network that exploits young people.

> exploits young people.

And their parents. And the general taxpayer (via student loans).

It's a literal racket.

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