[dyauspitr]

Everything should be free. The people writing the textbooks should spend 5 years of their life working on it for free.

[coeneedell]

They should get paid. The press should pay them. The college pays the press. The students pay the college. The press releases information for free.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Then students will just end up paying more in tuition, possibly more than the costs of textbooks. That extra money of course will go to increasing either/both the university president's or lead football coach's salaries.

[arikrahman]

The colleges will raise tuition anyways, and they do it at a runaway cost. Might as well throw in something useful and tangible like textbooks that they can bargain wholesale with the publishers. Individually, the students can only beg.

[bradyd]

The authors are "the press". So they somehow pay themselves?

[vonneumannstan]

So you're saying colleges will just increase tuition to cover the cost of textbooks right?

[free_bip]

Or they could lay off some middle managers. If they blame the layoffs on AI the market might even reward them for it.

[dyauspitr]

And what, use the historically fabulously successful flat model?

[vonneumannstan]

The market will reward colleges for layoffs?

[peesem]

if everything really was free then the textbook writers wouldn't need compensation since everything would be free for them too

[casey2]

If someone spent 5 years of their life ruining Euler's arrangement of calculus concepts that we've been using for the last 250 years then they don't deserve money.

[sixothree]

The point of most complaints is that the author isn't the one enjoying the profit from textbooks.