Why are academic works so incredibly expensive? Let me illustrate my point a bit.

Why are academic works so incredibly expensive?
Let me illustrate my point a bit. I got interested in these theologians after somebody posted a lecture series, in which one denounces the other. I searched both their names, and found a book of letters written by one, that has one sent to the other one
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137522498_11
Now look at this. I can buy the two page chapter as a pdf that costs $29.95, or I can buy the ebook for $109.00, or I can buy the hardcover book for $139.99
But why would I do any of that? I'm not in a class and I'm not getting a degree, this is just a peripheral interest of mine. I'm just not going to buy any of this. Thirty bucks for a two page pdf I'll read maybe once? You're out of your mind
So why even enter academia? Isn't the idea of publishing to get your ideas out there? I don't believe there is a human being on earth who has dropped over a hundred dollars for a copy of this book. When I google search for this book, I don't see a single image of a physical copy. Not one.
This isn't even the most unreasonably priced textbook out there. There are books costing five, six, or seven hundred dollars being sold on campus to 18 year olds right now.

Beware Cat Shirt $21.68

Rise, Grind, Banana Find Shirt $21.68

Beware Cat Shirt $21.68

  1. 1 year ago
    Cluster B

    Because it’s not meant for deplorable helots (You), but for university scholars (me).
    If you’re this desperate just use SciHub like the rest of the third worlders and armchair researchers.

    • 1 year ago
      Cluster B

      I'm trans by the way, not that it matters

      • 1 year ago
        Cluster B

        No I’m not.

    • 1 year ago
      Sage

      Given your behaviour I'll admit your trip is clever, but which of the cluster B's are you?

      • 1 year ago
        Cluster B

        I don’t talk to moronic namegays.
        I’m taking a break from this board from tomorrow.

        • 1 year ago
          Sage

          I was saging a thread and forgot to remove it. You also said the same a few days ago, don't forget:
          >you're here forever

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            sage doesnt go into the namefield, newbie

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    You get free access to jstor and other similar places if you are a confirmed wikipedia user with a few edits.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      seriously?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Yea, well, it’s actually more edits than I remember lol but I qualified some months ago:

        https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    They're not real books meant for real consumption. University libraries need to keep up to date and not fall behind having "the literature" in stock, even though 99% of what gets produced in the last 20-30 years is total filler and even borderline vanity press levels of cynically bad (for example, why does your library need the Blackwell, the Cambridge, the Oxford, the Ashgate, the Sneedle, the Chucko, and the City Slicker Companion to Spinoza's Ethics, when maybe 3 of the essays in the Cambridge are decent?). But they can't predict what is bad, because nobody can know every field, let alone some purchasing librarian. So they just buy everything, even if it's absolute trash from Routledge printed on toiler paper. The academic presses in turn know this, and know no actual person actually really wants their increasingly poorly edited (even the top presses have gone to shit since 2010) books. So their only possible audience is this captive audience of universities that can't afford to gamble on missing out on the one important book every year. So instead of charging $30 and actually trying to sell "Ontologies of (Ambi)valence: Carceral Climatology and BIPOC Bisexuality in the Anthropocene" to normal people, they sell it for $250 knowing only these few hundred libraries will buy them. Then in a few years the computer that increasingly runs the library will detect that no one has checked the book out, and dump it at the offsite storage facility for all the actual books nobody has checked out in 10+ years, which also includes all real books like Dostoevsky, because nobody uses the library anymore except as a study and socializing space and a place to buy and sell Adderall. You should libgen it or use your university library's scan request feature.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Dangerously blackpilled post

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      sheeeit

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >offsite storage facility
      where are these facilities and how easy/hard would it be to raid them?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        oscar the grouch anon here, i too am interested

        • 1 year ago
          Sage

          >offsite storage facility
          where are these facilities and how easy/hard would it be to raid them?

          In America we have a program called Friends of the Library which sells these books for about 50 cents each, even have a 10 cent day. I got half of the "Great Conversation" collection for 5 bucks at one of them.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Fantastic post.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Aye

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >But they can't predict what is bad, because nobody can know every field, let alone some purchasing librarian
      Very innocent of you. The universities know exactly what they're doing. It's all very incestuous.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      This is very true in my experience.
      Most awfully I can't even get the books I want from my university library and the archive system is utter trash.
      Some books I've taken out have never been taken out by anyone else as far as I can tell and they're usually at least 2 decades old now.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >"Ontologies of (Ambi)valence: Carceral Climatology and BIPOC Bisexuality in the Anthropocene"
      You got a real knack for inventing plausible names for bullshit anon.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Welcome to academia

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    You email the academic, ask to read the paper, and they send you a pdf. You then give the PDF to that ex-Soviet woman who is organising mass theft.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Armenian (Alexandra Elkabyan). But they're not updating the database of Sci-hub anymore, I think. Libgen is probably a more reliable place to upload.

      because its how they get paid.

      None of the money goes to the authors of academic articles.
      I advise everyone look up Elsevier. It's a good way to show how academic publishing is rotten and how you get these absurd prices. Also

      They're not real books meant for real consumption. University libraries need to keep up to date and not fall behind having "the literature" in stock, even though 99% of what gets produced in the last 20-30 years is total filler and even borderline vanity press levels of cynically bad (for example, why does your library need the Blackwell, the Cambridge, the Oxford, the Ashgate, the Sneedle, the Chucko, and the City Slicker Companion to Spinoza's Ethics, when maybe 3 of the essays in the Cambridge are decent?). But they can't predict what is bad, because nobody can know every field, let alone some purchasing librarian. So they just buy everything, even if it's absolute trash from Routledge printed on toiler paper. The academic presses in turn know this, and know no actual person actually really wants their increasingly poorly edited (even the top presses have gone to shit since 2010) books. So their only possible audience is this captive audience of universities that can't afford to gamble on missing out on the one important book every year. So instead of charging $30 and actually trying to sell "Ontologies of (Ambi)valence: Carceral Climatology and BIPOC Bisexuality in the Anthropocene" to normal people, they sell it for $250 knowing only these few hundred libraries will buy them. Then in a few years the computer that increasingly runs the library will detect that no one has checked the book out, and dump it at the offsite storage facility for all the actual books nobody has checked out in 10+ years, which also includes all real books like Dostoevsky, because nobody uses the library anymore except as a study and socializing space and a place to buy and sell Adderall. You should libgen it or use your university library's scan request feature.

      is a good summary - it is libraries and universities that are supposed to buy these books, not normal people.

      because its how they get paid.

      It literally isn't. Academics have to publish shit to keep or upgrade their position, so they don't get paid for it. Publishers usually keep all the profit.

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    This way they can be quoted by the MiniTrue agents who write articles but you won't spend $50 to verify if a PDF is filled with bullshit

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    because its how they get paid.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Academics are not getting paid per se. The publishing houses are because they know they can sell these books to every University in the US. Then these books will be turned into e-books that the universities will pay to maintain access to. Academic publishing is a farce

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It's to gatekeep knowledge. You either pay to be a worker bee in the gated community, or you don't. There isn't room for diligent autodidacts or eurdite hobbiests to be forming ideas and engaging in debates outside of the easily controlled Ivory Halls and it's lucrative production of """experts""".

  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    just search on not google the title followed by pdf

  9. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    i have accessed 9 out of 10 papers freely, and the 10th if its not on some university website as a free pdf then its not good enough

  10. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Don't believe any theologian that can't do miracles

  11. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I would assume a academic using it just gets their university to pay for it

  12. 1 year ago
    Chodely

    For what it’s worth, the book is available as a free pdf here.

    http://libgen.is/search.php?req=This+Silence+Must+Now+Speak&lg_topic=libgen&open=0&view=simple&res=25&phrase=1&column=def

  13. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Because this shit is totally worthless even (or - especially) for professionals and I mean it. Only hobbyists (who don't care about money or outright brag that they spend a lot) and students who are being forced to it by their teachers buy it and these are exactly the customers which will stomach the most outrageous prices.

  14. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >This site contains material licensed by your library.

  15. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    [...]

    >retaining reductive internet maymays for when i‘m rightfully called a moron

  16. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Academic publishers are such extreme bloodsucking vampire parasites that it beggars belief. Academic publishers are in their entirely own league, beyond even something as extreme as the notion of clown world metaphysics.
    They are the ultimate cuck-makers and profiteers, providing nothing of value, making the ones who make the product they sell PAY FOR THE PRIVILEGE of alowing the publisher to make money off of it, and then when the publisher does it, it does so in the most extortionate way imaginable. The universities which pay the publisher to publish their stuff which the publisher then make money off of then also pay the publisher obscene amounts of money to access the stuff they themselves have provided it with. This can best be conceptualized as some sort of recursive meta-cucking.

    The business model only works because anemic academics, almost by definition, are the ultimate spiritual masochists and cuckolds. That old headline that cuckolding is the fetish of Ph.D's is absolutely true, but it is not because they are smart, it is because academics are cuckolds, trivially and tautologically.
    What academic publishers

    What academic publishers do in reality with their business model is on a level of hyper-israelite that would, if the israelites were accused of it, make even a swastika-flag toting nazi think that the propaganda had gone too far and had become unbelievable.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      When I found out that they pay 5k to publish open access, I was shocked. You wrote the book for free, the peer reviewers did it for free just to add to their resume that they do peer review, and the type setting is basic. They are paying DeGruyter to host their pds.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        It’s for academics to pad their CVs and help make their promotion cases. It’s quite the world we live in.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      When I found out that they pay 5k to publish open access, I was shocked. You wrote the book for free, the peer reviewers did it for free just to add to their resume that they do peer review, and the type setting is basic. They are paying DeGruyter to host their pds.

      It’s for academics to pad their CVs and help make their promotion cases. It’s quite the world we live in.

      It's funny that gamers, who are considerably less cucked than academics, put a bare minimum of a fight against attempts at setting up similar practices in vidya.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Elaborate? Do game publishers do similar things to indie devs? Not IQfy, I apologize, but I’m genuinely curious

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I'm not a gamer, ew! I haven't touched a video game since 2011 and it was pirated.

  17. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Without a trace of irony, however

  18. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    homie, libgen and z-lib

  19. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    You know that “sage” doesn’t actually work in the “name” field, right? R..right?

    • 1 year ago
      Sage

      An old joke, sage in all fields

  20. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I am aware but it does nothing in the name field other than pollute the thread. Test it if you like, but I suspect that you’re the one who‘s been memed kiddo

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Certainly among the more pathetic attempts to not come off as the newbie.

  21. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I see you figured out to turn it off in the name field. Good for you!

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