[Myrmornis]

I'm 100% in favour of sci-hub.

However, note that they are very anarchic when it comes to commercial books, not just journal articles!

E.g. from the Sci-Bay search results, this is $131 on amazon.com, and quite possibly the authors do want the royalties.

[BOOK] Intelligent optimisation techniques: genetic algorithms, tabu search, simulated annealing and neural networks D Pham, D Karaboga - 2012 - books.google.com ... Cited by 916 Related articles All 3 versions [Download Book]

[gkya]

I believe people in academia are paid to write these books anyways, so they might as well not receive the royalties. As a prospective academic myself, I find it unethical.

[dagw]

I believe people in academia are paid to write these books anyways

While that does occasionally happen, it's definitely not true in general. The people I know who wrote academic books did so by taking a sabbatical from their university job and/or working evenings and weekends for the actual writing. Occasionally they can apply for a separate writing grant to cover their lost salary, but that's completely separate from their day job.

[gkya]

What I meant was their job is to author such books. Not that they should be paid separately for them. Depending on the country academicians might be underpaid, but that's an issue on its own.

[dagw]

What I meant was their job is to author such books

Except in many cases it isn't. Most of the people I know who have written academic books did so off the clock and on their own time. Sure the university let them use their university office and resources, and obviously much of the research the book is based on is research they'd already done as part of their job, but the actual writing time and any additional research they had to finance from sources unrelated to their university job.

[Myrmornis]

Yeah, that's not really how it works. See dagw's sibling reply, and note that there's a continuum between academic monographs that would only ever be in university libraries, to popular science books, in between which is a large textbook market, and note that you can download all the above for free right now from libgen. And I am not moralizing. It's an amazing free resource! Transformative for people in nations at an economic disadvantage, and transformative for people in the first world too -- it would cost thousands of dollars or hours of inefficient library visits to be able to consult such a breadth of resources. I just don't know how exactly we/society should think of this.

[gkya]

I believe we should fund most of it through the academicians wage. And if that resource is deemed too low for them at its current value in a certain country, increasing it is a better solution than trying to add extra rewards for things like books.