Dear All,
I offer a holiday factoid. I found 605 prices in
http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2014/2014-02-01.html (prices = a Euro or Dollar
sign followed by a number).
Total cost for these 605 book prices: $54,004 (assuming a current
exchange of $1.25 for 1 Eur) or $89.26 per book.
Those are just the books that someone bothered to review.
How many people have $54,000 to buy Classics monographs each year?
And, of course, we could a great deal more with those books if they were
(like BMCR) downloadable and subject to text mining. Of course, there is
nothing surprising in this -- I should have guessed it. Many of you may
know this figure.
If we assume that scholars spent $10,000 of their paid time for each of
these 600+ books (and hopefully they spent much more), then we have >
$6,000,000 of university investment supporting the production of these
books.
But as I look at the raw figures (and talk to people, especially anxious
junior scholars, who feel compelled to give the results of their work to
commercial publishers), I am reminded of how crazy this system is.
And, of course, all of those books -- at least those that are not Open
Access -- will be lost to modern research for generations, tied to the
publishers for 70 years after the deaths of their authors. If you are a
30 year old assistant professor and live to 80, then people will be able
to do modern research (and modern research includes text mining and
automated analysis) in about the year 2135.
Greg
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