Comment by bluedays
19 hours ago
I could play devils advocate and say that it’s bad for poor students because if authors are not fairly compensated then these authors won’t write textbooks and if they don’t then future students won’t benefit from having the textbooks.
Few academic authors are in it for the money.
I mean yeah, getting your work published just means that you can sue if someone steals it (often the case with those university presidents that they plagiarized work from undergrads or those who otherwise couldn't fight back). But if publishers stop making money off academic texts, then they won't be inclined to fight those battles. Then again, a lot of the money comes from university library subscriptions to entire catalogues of texts including books and articles, so either something you want to access is already in your ecosystem or it isn't.
When my courses had profs who had written the book, they'd have the school book store print and bind them to booklets, and sell them for close enough to cost, and also put up a download link for the pdf