They should get paid. The press should pay them. The college pays the press. The students pay the college. The press releases information for free.
So you're saying colleges will just increase tuition to cover the cost of textbooks right?
Or they could lay off some middle managers. If they blame the layoffs on AI the market might even reward them for it.
The market will reward colleges for layoffs?
And what, use the historically fabulously successful flat model?
Then students will just end up paying more in tuition, possibly more than the costs of textbooks. That extra money of course will go to increasing either/both the university president's or lead football coach's salaries.
The colleges will raise tuition anyways, and they do it at a runaway cost. Might as well throw in something useful and tangible like textbooks that they can bargain wholesale with the publishers. Individually, the students can only beg.
The authors are "the press". So they somehow pay themselves?
If someone spent 5 years of their life ruining Euler's arrangement of calculus concepts that we've been using for the last 250 years then they don't deserve money.
if everything really was free then the textbook writers wouldn't need compensation since everything would be free for them too
The point of most complaints is that the author isn't the one enjoying the profit from textbooks.