Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Good point, TV. But textbooks are a mandatory purchase, and the publishers have a monopoly on them (sometimes they even make a college-specific version of a textbook, to discourage second-hand sales. Isn't that evil?) Overall sales amount to billions. Many textbooks are already self-published by their professor/authors.

Less good point, Tom. It might be evil or even just undesirable for publishers to make money as middlemen, and for artists or authors to make a pittance. But those publishers have until now performed a valuable service. Creating a nice clear, (relatively) portable, (relatively) durable hard copy of a book is too much trouble for most of us. But in my opinion, they got greedy ($160 for a textbook!) and the lashback, plus advances in technology, are catching up to them.

In my view, traditional publishers are kind of like the pharoah's scribes: useful until paper became cheap and literacy became widespread. If I were them, I would begin checking out new lines of business. Look what happened to Kodak.