[p2p-research] lightfoot book sharing ?

[Ryan Lanham]

On 1/13/10, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The only things I've seen here at anything like £80 are limited-quantity
> hardbacks aimed at the university library market - where I think they are
> assuming high budgets, low demand, strong desire to purchase - but also that
> a large amount of sharing and copying will go on (basically, next to no
> end-users will buy their own copy).  That most of these books are also
> semi-available online confirms these suspicions.


George Siemens was quite rightly railing on this not long ago...I copied it
here.

Getting angry at universities is like getting angry at governments.  The
institutions are on auto-pilot.  Not much to be done.  I think there are a
fair number of fairly moral people caught up in too often bad systems.
There is room for hope but not much without continued painful crisis.  That
makes reformers tread the tricky moral ground of wondering whether they
should hope for ...or even enable crisis.

The alternative, which is what typically support, is to hope technology
causes sea change.  Someone like James Howard Kunstler, discussed in another
thread, sees the crises as inevitable and imminent regardless.  That's more
conventional dystopia...sort of like the long suffering Marxist variety
...a lot of praying for the 2nd coming as far as I'm concerned.  If it helps
you sleep at night, go for it.

It would be nice to see university faculty get their acts together on open
information, and it is happening in a few places, but the system is strong
and the opposition is very frail and frightened.  Half are bought off by
tenure sinecures to insouciance, the other half (and growing proportion) are
terrified they won't catch the gravy train as more and more bookish refuges
reach out their babies and their hands for ride.

As that second half gets more and more treated like industrial workers, they
are less and less likely to try alternative approaches.  As usual, it is up
to the students to innovate.  Given their extreme financial pressures at
even state institutions and the seeming necessity of a college education,
rocking the boat is unlikely.  Remember that almost all the powerful student
movements start at low cost institutions.  There are very good reasons for
this.  Tires are rarely found burning in streets where real estate prices
are high.  They made the buildings out of stone because they were wise, not
because they loved knowledge.

Ryan
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