[EUROCARE]

What do you mean, they're paid for by public money? I don't think that's true at all - at least in EU. Some of them get public donations (to support the independence of the authors, usually), and some of them are written by people paid by a university, but there's so much more completely independently funded textbooks...

[maltyr]

I might be reading into the previous poster's comment more than originally intended, but basically, most US textbooks, are basically written for use by US public schools. They are effectively being paid for by public money, because the only customer buying those textbooks are public schools funded by public money.

> For the years ended March 31, 2020 and 2019, K-12 traditional print represented 59% ($353 million) and 63% ($357 million) of total K-12 revenue, respectively.

> In the K-12 market in the United States,...We sell our learning solutions directly to school districts across the United States.

This is less true at the university level, since students typically have to pay for their own textbooks, but scholarships, grants, and loans, and other public money sources that go to students are used to cover those costs.

Source: McGraw Hill's 2020 Annual Report https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReports/PDF/N...

[spookie]

I'm also European, from Portugal specifically. Our taxes pay for mandatory schools textbooks, just like in the US it seems.

[EUROCARE]

I don't think this is the correct view of the system.

Individual schools in Portugal (as well as where I live, and in the US) are buying books on the market, and the books are competing on it - just writing a textbook doesn't guarantee any school will buy it, it's a risk - and that's great because it means the writers have to make good books and there's a lot of choice and many different styles and price levels.

That's very different from "textbooks paid for by public money" as if the state funded its creation and thus owned the copyright while de-risking it for the authors - meaning paid their salary. EU occasionally provides funding to authors and they're explicit about the writers owning their copyright, because the point is to support their independence. So suggesting moving a work into public domain just because a public school bought it is... weird. Why books and not other education equipment, e.g. chemistry/physics/electronics sets? What about educational software?

Imagine a school bought a book you wrote about programming/whatever you do (the school where I went did that a lot with many different books from small-time authors that were used as textbooks during lessons), should it suddenly become public domain just because some of the money someone spent on it came from taxes? I think that's very broken.

Public schools aren't the only ones buying textbooks anyways. There's a very healthy market of private schools, and I know of textbooks catered specifically to them, some of them even funded by them, that are then also bought by public schools. There's also homeschooling, alternative non-public non-profit schools, etc. Sometimes people buy textbooks by themselves, e.g. adults who want to (re-)learn, parents who think the books provided by school are inadequate, children who destroyed the copy they received at school...

That textbooks are "paid for by public money" is reductio ad absurdum. The system is much more complex. However, I think that the state/EU (or US) should also fund textbooks and put them into the public domain, as long as using them isn't mandatory - that's a great idea and it never hurts to have one more option.

[spookie]

Yeah, you're right. Even my reaction at Google software finding it's way into public schools is too extreme. I guess that my knowledge of these companies manipulative business practices does fire me up.

As long as there is a public competition, and the decision is well formed, intended and transmitted transparently, there shouldn't be a problem.

[andylynch]

I think GP means schools buying the books are typically using public funds to do so.