Well, both happen. There are great $200 books, and &#x27;core dump&#x27; $200 books. I&#x27;ve bought both. There are publishers out there that will take any material, rubber stamp it, and publish it for very large amounts of money. Just like there are journals that will accept papers on anything - I can&#x27;t tell you how many papers I start to read to realize that all they are doing is reporting on some well known result from 20+ years ago. Publish or perish, I guess.<p>How much does an academic get from one of these (good) books? I find it hard to believe it makes economic sense when you compare amount of labor vs money. I have an (unsigned) book contract sitting in my inbox right now - the money on offer is not a motivating factor, believe me. But, I&#x27;m an engineer, so I&#x27;m envisioning that instead of writing a book you could consult and make 10x to 100x return compared to writing. Probably not many consulting positions available in 15th century Spanish poetry. But I think I could get a better return on time working at McDonalds.<p>Anyway, academics <i>are</i> starting to write open access books. Books that no one can afford to buy, books that are not electronic and hence unsearchable, will be land fill in a few decades. We are awash in information, and this knowledge will be lost forever if we continue locking it up like this. No one is ever going to fly to, I dunno, EPFL, to wander dusty stacks for weeks to try to discover the single remaining copy of some unknown book that <i>might</i> benefit their research.<p>edit: another thread points out the existence of ILL. Fair enough. I still say any book locked on paper is dead, soon (of the type talked about in the article, defining books in the field will be known and accessible). These books get shredded after never being checked out; they aren&#x27;t going to exist in 200 years to be ILL&#x27;ed, or digitized after copyright runs out. Of course exceptions will exist; I&#x27;m talking in the large.<p>edit2: I am not an academic, but I read academic publications every day. Access is much more difficult on this side of the ivory tower. ILL is not easy to get access to. The times I have looked into it you usually see that there are two copies of the book available, and both are checked out and won&#x27;t be available for 3 months (end of semester). It&#x27;s better than nothing, but it is a <i>terrible</i> way to distribute information.