isilienelenihin replied to your post: Ugh ugh. Why is Textual Poachers so expensive in…
To crush your dreams. 😀APPARENTLY.
academic booooks *shakes fist*I’m not saying pirate it—I’m not—but… the majority of academic publishing is purchased by libraries. The reason that academic books are so expensive is that they aren’t really expecting individuals to buy them; they’re expecting them to be purchased by institutions, which can afford that sort of exorbitant price, and then make them available to their users for free. Hell, Jenkins probably didn’t pay for any of the books he accessed to write Textual Poachers. Academia is a lot like fandom that way.
I guarantee there are many, many copies of Textual Poaching in libraries. I don’t know what your personal situation is, but you could probably get it at from a library if you tried. And at that point, you really aren’t taking money out of anyone’s pocket, regardless of how you access the actual words.
Okay, now I am confused. Because don’t libraries have funding and support issues already? I mean, it seems totally counter-intuitive, especially when you consider how many copies of each book are likely to be purchased by a library vs/ what the actual reader-demand might be.
PLUS the fact that the academic publishing industry seems geared – libraries aside – more towards academics (including students and teachers and armchair-academics like myself), which is its own bundle of elitism and poverty, from what I hear, and it’s like a one-two punch of holding information hostage from those who are most likely to need/use it.
I have no issue with writers of any stripe making money off of their work – I am a total capitalism-for-creators gal, regardless of (and in part due to) my status as a fanwork creator and advocate. But the cost of academic texts still makes zero sense to me.
I do welcome further input/explanation on the subject, tho, don’t get me wrong.
[And the point re: looking for it at the library is fine (laudable!), if I merely want to read it, not actually have it in my library for continual reference/note-taking & etc…]
Oh yeah, and libraries do have funding/support issues, but libraries attached to universities generally don’t. If I’m looking for a book and my university library doesn’t have it, all I have to do is fill out a form and they buy it. Tthere’s probably an upper limit somewhere, but nothing I’ve ever asked for has apparently come anywhere close.) And I’m not even faculty.
That’s a bit of a different situation that community libraries, of course, but community libraries aren’t generally the market for academic publications in any case (at least, I don’t think they are).
ETA: The other thing is that academic writers generally* aren’t publishing for the money. Or, at least, not directly; they’re publishing because it’s a requirement of their university job, and will net them speaking engagements and invitations to visit and chair things and blah blah blah, which is where they’re getting money. But it’s not quite the same dynamic as, say, someone’s novel, or poetry, or what-have-you.
*there are probably a million exceptions to this, ugh, I am getting into some really questionable moral areas don’t pirate books.
Many university libraries do, in fact, have problems with funding, even if it’s to a lesser degree than public libraries. And Saathi’s quite right that this is becoming an untenable model. It’s been a long, vicious cycle: academic publications are mostly only of interest to academics, which means a small pool of buyers. So publishers crank up the price in order to turn a profit on smaller publishing runs. Then academics can’t afford to buy the books, so they start checking them out of their favorite libraries. Publishers crank up the price further, as the pool of buyers shrinks further, and libraries are saddled with the additional cost.
This is a model whose roots are found in medieval universities, where the cost of books was so exorbitant that almost NOBODY owned a very extensive library. At that time, it was imperative for scholars to associate themselves with a patron or organization (such as the church or a university) with the resources to build an extensive library that its scholars could access.
And that mindset has never really died out in universities. The entire academic-industrial complex (I just made that up, but it seems to fit, doesn’t it?) is still oriented toward that model, both financially and quite frankly socially (unaffiliated scholars often have a very interesting time getting published if they haven’t already done their time in academia), even though we live in an age which otherwise enables unparalleled freedom to free-range scholarship.
Wren’s right too, though, in a sense. At least regarding libraries and funding. At this point, the lion’s share of library acquisition costs is taken up by digital subscriptions. Hardcopy books are often expensive, but a library only has to shell out the price for a few copies. Each book is more or less a one-off expense. Whereas for digital publications, publishers tend to have a subscription arrangement, where the library pays for access rights according to the number of people expected to access it (i.e. every student and faculty member in the university).
You do NOT want to know what the annual library subscription rate for the NYTimes is, but if you’re thinking three figures, you’re probably thinking too small. But libraries’ hands are tied, because whereas books represent a static archive of mostly-established knowledge, journals and other publications represent what’s being discovered and discussed NOW. And researchers need access to that information to be able to keep their work current.
So yeah. TL; DR: it’s pretty fucked up.
Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet: isilienelenihin replied to your post: Ugh ugh. Why is Textual Poachers…