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Comment by HybridCurve | Hacker News Reader

> Publishers suing include Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education.

There was a time when I would buy books without being able to review all of the content. That stopped several years ago after buying two textbooks (one from McGraw Hill, another Pearson) that were so awful I returned them. They were both full of absolutely horrid page layouts with huge margins full of irrelevant information, just absolute garbage. I don't think they are losing money because their content is being distributed for free, but rather it just has little to no value and is not worth investment.

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Publishers work so hard to impose the limitations of paper on digital libraries.

I realize they're doing it to preserve their business model, but it shouldn't be at the expense of destroying a modern library of alexandria. The benefit to humanity of a global digital library is too great.

Have to rejigger that white space so that schools can require a new version the next year rather than people using used text books.

This, so much this.

And these have been the two main publishers I've had to deal with. And all the course content is structured around their organizational modality because the professors just dump their slide decks in lecture, except naturally much of the nuance is lost so, necessarily, one must have the book. However, I won't pay for it because I'm not going to support rent seeking that is totally degenerate, but I do get it free.

And even overlooking the dreadful formatting, the writing is often bad. This was especially true if the mathematics textbooks I've had to deal with.

> This was especially true if the mathematics textbooks I've had to deal with.

I shudder to think of how many people have struggled with math and written themselves off as mathematicians without ever thinking that maybe some of the blame didn't rest with them.

The textbook is bigger, so it must be better, right?

Sounds like the "Head First" series of books, which have such scattered layouts they make a Japanese newspaper look sane.

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