[p2p-research] lightfoot book sharing ?

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi Andy,

the price for a copy is exactly one bath, one fifthieth of a euro, and they
give you a very well bounded book for that price, it's really amazing,

but I would suggest it's not just the markup, but essentially the price of
labour, the personnel would typically have a salary of about $200 per month,
most often less, rarely more

students would be middle class, but even middle class families earn a lot
less than you would expect, and some universities, like mine, are very cheap
and quite 'working class'; under thaksin, schemes like 1 million
scholarships also expanded opportunities greatly to 'lower' strata ...

lower middle class students generally do not have their own computers, but
the university has huge rooms full of computers, and cybercafes abound on
nearly every street ...

but they use it for gaming, social networking, not for reading textbooks,
paper is still king,

Michel



>
> Michel - point taken, it's still very expensive for someone who's poor -
> aren't students often from elite / middle-class backgrounds though?  $40-50
> is also very expensive by comparison with mass market paperback fiction and
> "pop" science/psychology/etc, which in the UK starts at about $10 new and
> rapidly declines to postage price for online second-hand purchases (and less
> from second-hand shops).
>
> If photocopying is a lot cheaper then this is sure to have a big impact.
> It's rather strange that it's so much cheaper in Thailand, I wonder if this
> is typical of the South - maybe Northern photocopy sellers are making huge
> markups on cost, or paying some kind of photocopy rent?  Companies seem to
> scam horribly on printer ink as well, which also impacts how far people can
> rely on online copies (as I've said before, only a minority seem ready to
> read long pieces on-screen).  For poor students, reading on screen without
> paper might be even cheaper than copying, provided they have computers which
> would have to be a big "if".
>
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