Bibliomania: The Dark Side
Textbook publishers, too, have their role to play in Satan's legion. I don't want to make this a blanket condemnation, because there are a few prominent exceptions: Cambridge University Press and Springer, for example, who continue to publish nicely bound volumes of good stuff at usually quite reasonable prices. Overall, though, textbook prices have increased much more rapidly than inflation, and this has happened despite technological changes which have made it far cheaper to publish a textbook. Anyone who has recently paid for a college education knows that the savings have not been passed on to the students.
What has happened instead is that textbook publishers have become more skillful in exploiting the fact that students are a captive audience. They aren't really selling books to students, but to their teachers (who don't have to pay!). Many teachers are quite happy to assign their students several required textbooks, each costing about $150.
One striking effect of textbook inflation is the divergence in cost between textbooks sold for use by undergraduates and research level monographs (sold to researchers and graduate students) in the same field. The higher level, more advanced texts were formerly more expensive, probably because their much smaller audiences made the economics of scale much more unfavorable. Now the situation is almost reversed, with typical undergraduate textbooks two or three times as expensive as their more advanced counterparts.
But I really want to concentrate on two especially Satanic enterprises: McGraw-Hill and Wiley. Once upon a time these companies published lots of excellent texts on subjects in fields of interest to me (mostly physics and math). That ended a long time ago. Thanks to copyright laws which now essentially never expire, these companies continue to own the rights to a large number of classic texts, which they publish in shoddily bound editions at outrageous prices. Consider for example, the Wiley Classics library: The approximately forty year old three volume classic on Linear Operators by Dunford and Schwartz can now be purchase in a crummy paperback for about $340.
As usual, the largest share of blame goes to the corrupt and stupid jerks who constitute our Congress. Formerly, copyright expired 28 years (plus one extension) after issuance, a circumstance responsible for the many excellent books available from Dover at very reasonable prices. At the behest of greedy publishers, copyrights have now been extended to last 70 years beyond the death of the last surviving author.
It might be interesting to compare the history of optical astronomy in England. Key telescopic inventions were made in England which one might have expected to promote English astronomy. Thanks to English patent laws, they had the opposite effect. Because the key patents were held in England, it became to expensive to do astronomy in England, and leadership in the field passed to the continent.
Congress, in its zeal to protect the wealth of those already rich, threatens the engine of innovation that creates wealth. More on this topic some other time, perhaps.
I think a more appropriate copyright period for textbooks might be about 25 years, with no option for renewal - though significantly revised versions should be allowed their own, separate copyright, which would not affect the original work. This would have two beneficial effects: published work would fall into the public domain before it became of purely historical interest, and authors would be encouraged to revise existing editions if, and only if, progress in knowledge justified their separate existence. Copyright for other types of work (fiction, movies, music) should be quite separate and different, and, in most cases, longer.
What has happened instead is that textbook publishers have become more skillful in exploiting the fact that students are a captive audience. They aren't really selling books to students, but to their teachers (who don't have to pay!). Many teachers are quite happy to assign their students several required textbooks, each costing about $150.
One striking effect of textbook inflation is the divergence in cost between textbooks sold for use by undergraduates and research level monographs (sold to researchers and graduate students) in the same field. The higher level, more advanced texts were formerly more expensive, probably because their much smaller audiences made the economics of scale much more unfavorable. Now the situation is almost reversed, with typical undergraduate textbooks two or three times as expensive as their more advanced counterparts.
But I really want to concentrate on two especially Satanic enterprises: McGraw-Hill and Wiley. Once upon a time these companies published lots of excellent texts on subjects in fields of interest to me (mostly physics and math). That ended a long time ago. Thanks to copyright laws which now essentially never expire, these companies continue to own the rights to a large number of classic texts, which they publish in shoddily bound editions at outrageous prices. Consider for example, the Wiley Classics library: The approximately forty year old three volume classic on Linear Operators by Dunford and Schwartz can now be purchase in a crummy paperback for about $340.
As usual, the largest share of blame goes to the corrupt and stupid jerks who constitute our Congress. Formerly, copyright expired 28 years (plus one extension) after issuance, a circumstance responsible for the many excellent books available from Dover at very reasonable prices. At the behest of greedy publishers, copyrights have now been extended to last 70 years beyond the death of the last surviving author.
It might be interesting to compare the history of optical astronomy in England. Key telescopic inventions were made in England which one might have expected to promote English astronomy. Thanks to English patent laws, they had the opposite effect. Because the key patents were held in England, it became to expensive to do astronomy in England, and leadership in the field passed to the continent.
Congress, in its zeal to protect the wealth of those already rich, threatens the engine of innovation that creates wealth. More on this topic some other time, perhaps.
I think a more appropriate copyright period for textbooks might be about 25 years, with no option for renewal - though significantly revised versions should be allowed their own, separate copyright, which would not affect the original work. This would have two beneficial effects: published work would fall into the public domain before it became of purely historical interest, and authors would be encouraged to revise existing editions if, and only if, progress in knowledge justified their separate existence. Copyright for other types of work (fiction, movies, music) should be quite separate and different, and, in most cases, longer.
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