Yeah yeah I know, probably obvious cause corporations gonna corporation but yeah book prices are getting really high and likely will continue to rise. Appreciate and support your local library
It’ll be interesting to see how long publishers last before they price themselves out of business. We’re already seeing it in academia. A growing number of professors are refusing to assign texts from Pearson (who are trying their very best to become a monopoly) and other traditional publishers. Instead, we’re either writing our own or contributing to open source textbooks that we then give freely to students.
I wonder how long before this becomes the case with pop culture literature. There’s already a large number of very successful writers (by number of books sold) who cut out the traditional publishers and sell directly to readers. It seems likely that this number will only grow as books are priced out of reach for more consumers.
I didn’t know that academia was already bypassing traditional publication systems, but I am all for it. For literature, seeing how in many cases publishers are more into gatekeeping what is published than doing quality control or improving it I am very happy when authors become independent and do everything on their own. As you said, next years are going to be interesting in this sense. Let’s just hope that Amazon doesn’t take over the whole system, as it is already trying to do.
I need to say here that the topic of piracy is nuanced. For someone who has the privilege of living in an area with a well funded library, it is much more preferable for them to utilize that than piracy. Writers outside of a very select few get paid a lot less than people realize. Though I will say in areas where books aren’t easily accessible by any legal means I am of the personal opinion that is an ethical duty to make human knowledge and culture easily accessible whether by building a library or other means.
This might be a bit much, but unlike diapers and food, people don’t need books. They can only increase the price so much before we buy fewer books or none at all.
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