Ask Lemmy

not the end-all be-all like a literary author

I mean they do say publish or perish. But technically you are correct. And there are some teaching-heavy jobs too. Also I don't really care about the people who are at the top of academia.

I am also not sure how you can look at the deals publishers and journals make with colleges to ecosystem lock students with things like portal codes you can only get by buying the textbook/resources new from the school and think that the loss of IP protection would do anything to the publishers besides remove the cost they pay the authors. It’s already a scam/racket, and that won’t change without legislation making that illegal.

Absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I guess it depends on the country. Here, a lot of students pirate their books anyway. Personally, I didn't buy a single book during my bachelors/masters.

EDIT: but I think we're getting two things confused here, journal publishing and books. Journal articles and conference proceedings is the thing I wanted to concentrate on because that is the weird edge case where the standard IP / author compensation approach doesn't apply.

Books within academia work mostly in a similar way to other book publishing, and of course people who are currently making money out of that don't want that to stop. Which doesn't mean they'd be worse off without IP based publishing in books in the long term either.