Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluish29 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

>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.

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.

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.

Anything else you've noticed the free market compromising on re: air travel.

Quality generally with many manufactured goods. There are health and safety regulations but if there were a requirement for a 20-year warranty (which is about what my Aeron chair has) both quality and prices would probably increase significantly.

In the opposite direction, you're not actually allowed to generally buy a car without modern safety features. (Although automakers do make cars that are have higher or lower safety ratings within the regulatory framework.)

A common thread is that when push comes to shove, a lot of consumers will choose the lower price.

The straight-to-landfill consumer goods make me sad, but I guess I can buy cheaper tires and only drive in ideal conditions so there can be a place for middling quality.

Or tools for the occasional household use. You might not want junk but that table saw you use maybe a handful of times a year may not have to be as high-end as what a carpenter might use most days.

Which would be fine if you could tell if you could actually reliably find high quality products. But I'm increasingly finding it difficult to distinguish between paying more for quality and paying more for overpriced junk.

The 'Project Farm' reviews on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/@ProjectFarm) really have been eye-opening for me in that regard; sometimes there is still a strong correlation between price and quality but half the time the best quality (not just price to quality ratio -- subjective or otherwise) ends up clustering in decidedly interesting places.

The market in question was airlines. US airlines have rather a lot of competitors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airlines_of_the_United...

How many does Boeing have?

Luggage. Airlines make quite a bit hauling cargo on passenger flights so they are essentially subsidizing seats as long as people don’t check bags and charging inflated prices when they do.

Convenience especially in terms of number of flights. This gets into a bunch of economic and logistical issues, but airlines are happy to abandon less profitable areas. While regulators want regular service even if the demand isn’t quite there

Service. The minimum number of attendants is based on safety, airlines would happily cut those workers.

Safety.

free luggage, free meals (on shorter flights), legroom, time on the ground and flight cancelation headaches (far less of a problem if you don't offer connecting flights like Ryanair).

If you get all of these right, price decreases, demand increases, average seat occupancy goes way up, and that causes the per-seat price to drop even more, in a feedback loop. If your costs are low enough, you can go for a direct model instead of a hub-and-spoke model, catering more towards casual travelers who just want to go somewhere instead of the business types which need to go from X to Y at time Z, no matter the cost. THe direct model drives the cost down even more, as you only need one flight instead of two, and don't have to worry about the insane costs of passengers stranded at your hub when something goes wrong.

During the era of heavy airline regulation in the US, the Los Angeles to San Francisco route was significantly (about 4x IIRC) cheaper than other routes of similar length. This was because it was the only (popular) route of this length that didn't cross state lines, and so the onerous federal airline regulations did not apply.

So no, it wasn't just manufacturers building more efficient aircraft.

Average ticket prices didn’t suddenly fall anything like 75% within 2 or even 10 years of reduced regulations. Which should make it clear it wasn’t onerous federal regulations causing that difference.

Adjusted for inflation and including fees domestic round-trip airfare in 1979 averaged $617.47 vs $366.92 in 2016 a 40% drop. Which looks pretty good, though there was that 1979 oil crisis which needs to be accounted for which complicates the inflation comparison.

Meanwhile Jets become 70% more fuel efficient between 1967 and 2007. As airliners use a mix of newer and older aircraft there’s a delay before improvements affect prices. But most of that improvement was front loaded so by 2018 domestic airlines where getting 58 pay passenger miles per gallon of fuel an unheard of number in 1979 which again also happened to be the middle of an oil crisis.

How they respond depends on whether the regulation causes or mitigates market power. for example,Something like deregulating the last mile for internet is probably not going to end well because the incumbents control that and that is the mote that is expensive enough to recreate that it causes monopoly. Copyright causes monopoly because it stops marginal price being able to equal marginal cost by allowing only one person the right to provide the copyrighted thing. get rid of it and price goes to zero pretty fast because cost of electronic diatribution is near zero

> that is the mote that is expensive enough to recreate

A somewhat large part of why it is so expensive to recreate is all the regulations and burreaucracy involved in laying cables along public roads. Make that significantly easier and cheaper, and you suddenly need those last-mile regulations a lot less.

Network effects are where you actually need regulation.

I am skeptical that removing rwgularion would solve all of the last mile issue because there is a moaaic of different starting posotions and what that looks like determines the deregulated cost of dupkicating service (eg does a govt owned utility own the poles and will allow cheap usage or does the incumbent fpr profit own it and will blocl usage as justone starting condition of many).

> I can’t think of any case where regulation/government was reduced and companies responded with something less profitable for the company.

When the government deregulated air travel prices, routes, and schedules.

And if we're talking textbooks, I'm not sure what cutting copyright to 14 years actually accomplishes. I'm also not sure how you dole out X% of sales to libraries that might be interested. Especially given libraries are often ill-defined.

I don't think anyone would really complain if such an act assumed "libraries" == "public libraries", a very well defined term that's already enshrined in federal legislation.

Fine, abolish copyright then, let's see what happens.

We know what will happen. Germany had no copyright protections in the 19th century. The country's economy boomed, making Germany the industrial powerhouse of Europe.

Can you expand on this point? Having no copyright being a leading cause of industrial expansion seems pretty tenuous. Especially given that they now have copyright and other countries also had booming economies at about the same time.

The printers went looking for things to print, and they printed anything and everything. The easiest way to get material to print, besides copying other printers' output, was to commission how-to manuals. Germany was flooded with how-to informational manuals on every topic.

Much like the software industry. Free software runs the world.

It is less regulation in that it gets the governmemt out of interfering with the market outcome (marginal price of dostribution is effectively zero so market outcome without copyright is zero price electeonic diatribution). The percentage sales requirement is just an easy way to force intelligent behavior by copyright holders for public libraries to lessen the market failure for the poors caused by copyright. I am open to simpler ideas as long as the outcome is copyright fuckery does not result in no provision of knowledge for the poors and only extractive pricing for a short time period that incentizes additional content creation for the rest of us.

It's literally less in that the time the copyright is enforced (aka regulated) is less.

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 :)

What you really want here is for ebooks to be subject to First Sale. In general "licensing" should be restricted to the rights of the copyright holder, e.g. giving someone a license to permanently increase the number of copies that exist in the world, as when an author licenses a publisher. If someone has bought a copy, that should be theirs, they should be free to transfer it to other devices and other people as long as there continues to be only as many permanent copies as they've purchased, and the copyright holder can't impose any further restrictions on that, essentially as an anti-trust anti-tying rule because copyright is a monopoly.

Then libraries could buy physical or digital copies and do the thing they've always done.

It doesn’t really make sense to transfer the concept of first sale to digital goods. Even assuming a scheme that allows a library to fully control lending so that only one copy is in use at a time, a digital copy is not going to wear out. So publishers lose out on sales of popular titles when a library would need to refresh a physical copy.

It takes longer for a physical copy to wear out than copyright terms should last to begin with. Also, you're allowed to repair books -- because it's your book.

I own multiple books that are over 100 years old. They weren’t even that expensive.

If you're going to nitpick on this, fine... some research can be done on the number of uses a book can go through before it wears out and apply that to the e-book. It's certainly more than 26 and absolutely more than 2 years (how this 2 years condition is acceptable I'll never know)

Being free to share information is the natural state. The copyright is an artificial restriction introduced to allow authors to benefit from their works, and by proxy, the publishers to whom they sell those rights. Perpetual rent seeking is not now nor was it ever the purpose of those laws. They certainly have nothing to do with some sort of physical copy planned obsolescence system.

One of the best features of Valve's Steam platform is exactly that it gives users the ability to perpetually install the software they have purchased, even if the publisher other removes it from the platform. If users were allowed to resale their purchased games, it would be nearly at full par with first sale doctrine.

Digital systems are a modern bypassing of such prior conventions and laws, and it makes perfect sense to extend them in that direction with time.

What you’re proposing would require a literal quantum shift in DRM, where it’s only possible to use a copy of something if that thing hasn’t been itself copied somewhere else. That world would ironically unite the desires of publishers, creators, and actual archivists, leaving only the pirates out in the cold. Whoever figures out how to do that is going to make a fortune.

No you wouldn't. It's not about DRM, it's about the contractual agreements between libraries and publishers. They already track the number of times it's borrowed and for how long. OP is suggesting that it should be dealt with the same as a hard copy, i.e. only one person can borrow it at a time.

Proposing that any rights holder would accept a solution where there is no technical control preventing arbitrary copying is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be cool, I’m saying it’s never going to happen.

Secondly, you should reread their post, it’s much broader than your interpretation. They were envisioning a world where the device and copying restrictions we have today don’t exist.

I'm not sure we're on the same page. How do you think libraries loan out ebooks, currently? DRM for this exact functionality is already implemented by most publishers

You should reread their post, libraries usage is incidental to what they’re talking about. Their point, that first sale should apply to ebooks, requires a fundamentally different approach to DRM. If I own my content and can put it on any device I want, how can the seller be sure I’m only using one copy at a time? Consider the case that I might have it on multiple different devices which aren’t connected to the internet, they’re saying I should be able to do that while keeping the requirement that only one copy be usable at a time.

My reference to quantum was saying that this usage pattern would require something like quantum entanglement to replicate the state of which copy is active among all copies.

I'm not sure if the librarians in the article meant this but that's beside the point. The publishers can enforce a DRM on their side such that only one reader gets it at a time and adjust the contracts with the libraries accordingly, no need for fancy quantum stuff for client-side DRM.

> If I own my content and can put it on any device I want, how can the seller be sure I’m only using one copy at a time?

They can't, which is the same as it is now. DRM is a farce and everything is on The Pirate Bay. Which is why restricting libraries like this is ridiculous -- anybody who doesn't care to follow the law doesn't need to get a copy from a library, they can just download it from a piracy site. The reason you go to the library instead is that you want to follow the law.

There is no justice in following unjust laws.

> that it should be dealt with the same as a hard copy, i.e. only one person can borrow it at a time.

That's how it works in every library system I have dealt with

Yeah same but as the article states, there are extra terms in the agreement such as a maximum of 26 loans and a two-year renewal, whichever comes first. And the ebook is usually 4 times more expensive than the physical one just for that period. It should be treated just like a hard copy in all these manners.

In a zero regulation world, you consider either that there's no copyrights, or that copyrights have infinite length

>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?

I mean, the free market is working pretty well.

http://libgen.rs/

The government-granted monopoly, not so much.

> I mean, the free market is working pretty well.

> 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.

Unfortunately many are misled to believe that pirating books published by cartels is unethical.

Please explain your alternative mechanism for compensating the author for their work.

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.

> Unfortunately many are misled to believe that pirating books published by cartels is unethical.

It's not a question of ethical vs unethical, but about which evil you consider to be the worse.

Yeah, I agree. I think it can be a case-by-case situation depending on both the reader and the publishere/author. An undergrad needing a course textbook that's published by a monopolistic cartel with a 300% markup? Absolutely. For well-paid worker in a developed country buying a novel written by a niche author? probably not the right thing to do.

It's very unclear how book sales translate into income for authors. You are rewarding middlemen; these middlemen have a role that may or may not be important these days.

How is this a market if Boone is paying? If anything, this is communism?

You can’t even have a market of IP without government granted ownership of IP.

This tired old trope that Government vs market doesn’t work here

The bad communism is when the government takes your stuff and you don't have it anymore. This is "communism" in the same way that everyone being able to breathe the air or speak English without paying a proprietor for the right is "communism". This is often a motte and bailey that communists use, but you're attacking the motte.

You're essentially arguing that there isn't a market for air. But there is. This is the market served by submarines and firefighting gear and spacecraft and HEPA filters.

If no one had a monopoly over copies, you'd still have a market to supply them, they'd just generally be really cheap and the supplier would be someone like Cloudflare. Likewise there would still be a market for creating works, because people would pay for commissions. There might not be as many of them, but there would still be a market.

> You can’t even have a market of IP without government granted ownership of IP.

Sure you can. See Germany in the 19th century with no IP protections. Business and prosperity boomed!

Consider also the incredible success of open source software.

> You can’t even have a market of IP without government granted ownership of IP.

What on earth are you thinking? For essentially all of human history, every work of art was produced for the market, and it was impossible to own any IP.

I mean digital - of course you can have a market for physical things.

Songs are not physical things, but that has never stopped them from being produced for the market. Same goes for stories, and for all other forms of oral content. These are not things that we've ever been short of.

How could you possibly arrive at this conclusion? Think of the most famous stories / literature works before year 1500 - myths of Ancient Greece, the bible, ancient folklore about fairy folk - none of it was produced for a market of any kind.

You are unfairly taking credit for the fundamental human need of self expression, and assigning it to your preferred ideological position.

Can you name 5 famous stories, before year 1500, that were made ‘for the market’?

Even penicillin was not created for the market. Most scientific discoveries weren’t.

> How could you possibly arrive at this conclusion?

Because I know what it means to create something for the market?

> Can you name 5 famous stories, before year 1500, that were made ‘for the market’?

Given that I've already pointed out that all such stories were made for the market, how do you expect me to answer this?

Can I name five famous stories from before the year 1500?

The Tale of Cupid and Psyche

The Shahnameh

Nüwa Knocks a Hole in the Sky

The Divine Comedy

The Epic of Gilgamesh

> myths of Ancient Greece, the bible, ancient folklore about fairy folk - none of it was produced for a market of any kind.

As I have already pointed out, all of these were produced for a market. Why would you state otherwise? What do you think it means to offer something on a market? (Why do you think the general term for the space where these things live is "the marketplace of ideas"?)

> Even penicillin was not created for the market. Most scientific discoveries weren’t.

Penicillin wasn't created at all, as you suggest by calling it a "discovery". But we use it today because it was offered on the market by someone who hoped to receive the rewards that the market would offer for it.

> Given that I've already pointed out that all such stories were made for the market

You made unsubstantiated assertion that lays claim to a millennia of human history. You offered no evidence of any kind.

> I know what it means to create something for the market

Firstly, that that statement itself is debatable. Secondly, one would need extraordinary knowledge of history to make claims about for thousands of stories written across thousands of years.

I cannot help but conclude that you are an ideologue and you believe there is no life outside ‘the market’ and when I write something in my personal blog, or invent a story for my child, that’s ’the market’ too.

I find this level of ideological appropriation repulsive.

On producing specific books. Nothing to stop me writing a novel with the same themes as yours has.

If one company has a monopoly on faucets, another has one on pipes, another has one on valves, you're trying to argue that there is plenty of competition for "plumbing supplies" but that doesn't help you if you need a faucet and there's only one supplier.

Notice how your argument, if true, would defeat the point of the monopoly. If there were ten books that were all fungible with one another then each of the suppliers would want to lower prices to increase sales and you'd end up at the marginal cost, which for digital products is zero. And sometimes this even happens -- there is a lot of free-as-in-beer software, free-with-ads news websites etc. But the context of lending libraries is for when that isn't the case. You don't need to get a copy of nginx from the local library because you can get it for free from the authors.

That’s not how this marketplace works at all. A better analogy is to say that BMW has a monopoly on making BMWs, yet they are still forced to compete with Porsche, who has their own monopoly on creating Porsches.

There’s a two-sided marketplace for creative works, where publishers need to get works from creators and license them to customers. They want to maximize their own profits, but they also need to make a certain amount revenue as all methods of distribution have fixed costs.

Given that book prices are rising faster than _anything else in the economy_ the market place isn't working at all.

Let them eat competition.

Huh? In the United States books have inflated by -0.1% per year since 1997, compared with the overall economy which inflated at 2.46% per year on average during the same period. Because of the stiff competition.

Unless you mean specifically textbooks, which are inflating because piracy has destroyed the demand (the annual revenue of the textbook market is down ~33% since 2014, despite increases in both prices and enrollment in colleges). You can see the causal link here as increases in pricing are lagging decreasing sales. If the prices were driving the decreasing sales you would expect the opposite behavior.

Why start at 2014?

https://archive.attn.com/stories/1164/heres-exactly-why-coll...

Between 1975 and 2014 college books outpaced inflation over three times.

You should look at that chart a bit more carefully.

> A better analogy is to say that BMW has a monopoly on making BMWs

BMW is a trademark. You can't take a Kia and put a BMW badge on it. You can, in principle, make an exact replica of a particular BMW model and put your own badge on it, and in that sense BMW doesn't have a monopoly on "BMWs" except insofar as some of the parts may be patented or (for the software) copyrighted. But that isn't an analogy, it's the original thing.

Notice what happens when you take the original thing (intellectual property) out of the equation, your statement becomes "Bayer has a monopoly on aspirin", which they don't, because the Aspirin trademark became generic and it's not under patent.

First, BMW has thousands of patents. They also have trademarks, copyrights, and trade secret manufacturing processes. Second, if you make a non-BMW you can’t legally sell it as a BMW or you’re committing fraud. Third, most of the reason that people buy luxury brands like BMW is actually because of the cachet that the name has, so even if you could make an identical one in Prussia and call it a PMW, it would be a different and less valuable thing. All of which is a long winded way of saying, BMW are the only ones who can make BMWs. Thus they have a monopoly on making BMWs.

Taking intellectual property out of a conversation about intellectual property has predictably strange and totally irrelevant results. Why is that surprising?

No. I have a monopoly on faucets made to my design, not on faucets generally. Bloomsbury have a monopoly on Harry Potter books, Penguin can still publish Percy Jackson.

Exactly.

This is the same as saying a carpenter has a monopoly on their work. They can sell it to an employer up front by the hour or afterwards as a good. But no one else can come along and take it without paying.

> No. I have a monopoly on faucets made to my design, not on faucets generally.

You can try to subdivide any particular market but you still can't get yourself out of the second half of the post: If the products were actually substitutes then the prices would approach the marginal cost. If they're not, they're not.

College textbooks are an obvious example of this. Anybody can make "math textbook" but only one of them will have the homework problems your professor will assign in them, so you need that one and the publisher has a monopoly.

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.

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.

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.

Didn't the kids go into debt to learn how the world really works?

This is how we are. For now.

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.

> 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.

What will happen is that universities will pass these costs to all students where now paying students will pay more.

A better regulation will be encouraging and funding more open access materials that can be used and require public funding receivers to adopt them or decrease the funding and cap the tuition increases.

One of my students told me they all pirate textbooks. I haven't been a student in a university for almost 30 years but I remember what it was like. It was a scam back then.

When I was in college, the internet was relatively young, but that didn't stop us from using it to cut out the bookstore out as the middleman for reselling books. Our local test Usenet group was where all the cool kids hung out and we used that as a place to sell and trade used books for a fraction the cost of the bookstore.

But that mechanism no longer works in the ebook era. So I'm not surprised students found another way.

(Dad was a teacher, too, and he also couldn't bear forcing his students to pay for new editions of a textbook. So he wrote his own. Students could print copies at cost in the print shop (pre-internet). I've continued the tradition of writing my own books and putting them online for free for the students. Greed over educational materials is a poor look. Also, AI is coming.)

Is the state of open source textbooks that bad? I guess the top link is a U of MN site, which is laudable and a Big10 school, but not exactly a banner carrier.

It saddens me that with github and the like, and the armies of wikipedia entries, there aren't open source textbooks of greater/higher quality than any of the publishers. I guess biology and some sciences deviate a lot edition to edition, but basic math? physics? chemistry? economics? history? languages?

Of course institutes of higher learning have well exposed themselves as being anything but in the last couple decades. So it doesn't really surprise me. The entire "open coursework" movement died quite quickly when the colleges realized this might cut into their annual 10% hike to tuition.

But like your father, I'm surprised some retired teachers don't do this as a side project, or an emeritus professor, or SOMEONE that wants to leave a legacy.

You could have a site that presents concepts in entirely different fashions, so you could choose a path that suits you, or if a particular concept didn't stick, have it presented a different way.

State institutions in particular should be required to produce and use open textbooks and courseware. Rile up some republicans to make it contingent on getting their state funding (they love doing that).

This is even more egregious since there is the entire British Commonwealth of nations/english speakers and their educational systems to leverage.

>The entire "open coursework" movement died quite quickly when the colleges realized this might cut into their annual 10% hike to tuition.

My sense is that there's quite a bit of "open coursework" out there if you're talking about mostly raw materials.

If you're talking about MOOCs, universities started pulling back after it became obvious that they had mostly "not lived up to expectations." The combination of the students most needing them largely lacking motivation, the fact that credentials weren't generally viewed as valuable, the lack of lab and tutorial resources, and VC-companies pivoting are probably just the main factors.

Check out LibreText and OpenStax.

"Dad was a teacher, too, and he also couldn't bear forcing his students to pay for new editions of a textbook. So he wrote his own. Students could print copies at cost in the print shop. I've continued the tradition of writing my own books and putting them online for free for the students."

Thanks for that. My professors were in part like yours. But some other professors (I think it was about MBA folks, not IT people) apparently urge everyone to buy their really expensive book. And if you did not, you would have no idea about the weird case in chapter 2, he makes the exams about ..

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.)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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/

> 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.

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.

> Free market hardly work there.

Buying things with taxpayer funding and legal mandates is not free market.

yep so is buying back bank, mortgage and insurance companies

> 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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com