Name: Why is knowledge getting so expensive? | Jeffrey Edmunds | TEDxPSU
Uploaded: 2025-12-01T16:01:15.000Z
Duration: 16 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Imagine you work in a library, and one day a van pulls up in front of your building.

Several people get out, they come into your library, and they show you a list, and

they say, according to our records, you no longer have access to these 5,432 books.

They march into your stacks, pull those books off the shelves, load them in the van, and

Strangers coming unannounced into your library and making off with a significant chunk of your collection.

My name is Jeff Edmonds, and I do work in a library.

I've been with the Penn State libraries here well over half my life.

And I can tell you that as bizarre as that scenario sounds, it plays out in essence every single day, not only here at Penn State, but

at libraries all over the country as the result of the shift in our collections from books to ebooks.

How many of you have ever purchased a book?

Now, how many of you have ever purchased an ebook?

Would it surprise you to learn that you didn't purchase an ebook, that it's impossible to buy an ebook?

To understand why, we have to look at U.S.

copyright law, specifically the part of the law that codifies what you can and cannot do with with the book that you've purchased.

When you buy a book, that book becomes your personal property.

And if you do resell it, you get all the money.

The copyright holder, be it the author or the publisher, has no claim on that sale.

Now, imagine if that were true for ebooks.

Imagine if you could buy and resell an ebook the same way you can buy and resell a print book.

We all know that it's infinitely easier to create copies of and distribute copies of digital objects like an ebook compared to a print object like a physical book.

So as the Internet became a thing, publishers realized they faced a crisis.

If consumers could buy and resell ebooks the same way we can buy and resell print books, their profit margins would evaporate and the publishing industry would collapse.

So when you clicked on buy it, what you were paying for was not that ebook.

You were merely buying a license to access that text.

Now, if this distinction between buying and owning outright a print book versus paying for a license to access an ebook seems minor to us as individual consumers, for libraries like the One here at Penn State, where I work, that collect millions of ebooks, this distinction has profound and unsettling implications.

We currently have about 10 million items.

Of those, more than 6 million are online.

Fewer than 4 million are actual physical books in the stacks.

So already the majority of our collections are online.

And because they're ebooks, they're not owned in the same way our print collections are.

And because they're merely licensed, they're subject to removal.

Every month, we're compelled to remove thousands, tens of thousands, and

some months, even hundreds of thousands of ebooks from our catalog.

This is the van pulling up in front of our building and making off with a chunk of our collection.

Which begs the question, who's driving the van?

If libraries don't own and control their ebook collections, who does?

And in the realm of scholarly publishing, the kind of publishing that concerns us in an environment like Penn State, there are five publishers that control the marketplace.

And because they control the marketplace, they leverage their advantage in several different ways.

First, the cost of ebooks is artificially high.

On average, it costs more to license an ebook than it does to buy a print book outright.

Second, the cost of ebooks over the past several decades has has risen much faster than the rate of inflation.

Third, publishers compel libraries to sign contracts that include non disclosure clauses so that we can't discuss prices with our peer institutions.

Penn State, for example, can't go to the University of Michigan or Rutgers or UCLA and ask, how much did you pay for this package of ebooks?

We have no way of determining what a fair market price is.

Fourth, publishers bundle their content together so that we're compelled to license thousands and even tens of thousands of ebooks that we neither want nor need.

Imagine you're in the grocery store and you go into the cereal aisle and you pull your favorite cereal off the shelf and put it in your cart.

And a clerk at the end of the aisle says, what are you doing?

And they say, no, no, no, you can't do that.

Store policy is that you have to buy one of each.

And yet that's what publishers are doing to libraries, forcing us to end up with thousands of things we neither want nor need.

Now this very uneven, unfair relationship becomes even more Absurdist when you consider where the knowledge comes from that populates these ebooks.

Those manuscripts are passed to peers who then make comments.

The comments are passed back to the authors, who then revise their manuscripts to improve them.

And then ultimately, an editor or an editorial board decides that this manuscript is worthy of publication, say, as an e book or as an article in a scholarly journal.

Now, note that all of the intellectual labor I just described from start to finish is done at universities.

The salaries of these people are paid for by universities.

So if you're a student paying tuition, your money is being used in part to fund this enterprise of knowledge creation.

Like many institutions, Penn State is a public university.

We depend on money from the commonwealth every year for our operating budget.

So here you have tax taxpayer dollars being used to fund this enterprise of knowledge creation.

While some grants can originate from a private individual or private enterprise, the vast majority have a strong publicly funded component.

So, again, public funds being used to fund this enterprise are of knowledge creation.

So we've funded this process, We've done the work, we've created the knowledge.

And then what do we do with our manuscript?

We hand it off to one of these publishers, who then license it back to us at enormous cost.

The libraries here at Penn state spent over $13 million on ebooks and other electronic resources last year.

Given the dire straits in which higher education finds itself, we know, for example, that Penn State just a couple of years ago was facing a $142 million budget deficit.