Pirating the Pirate Meme

A professor at Cal Tech is encouraging you to go do some pirating.

Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free

A final similarity, in the words of R. Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech, is that both textbook publishers and drug makers benefit from the problem of “moral hazards” — that is, the doctor who prescribes medication and the professor who requires a textbook don’t have to bear the cost and thus usually don’t think twice about it.

“The person who pays for the book, the parent or the student, doesn’t choose it,” he said. “There is this sort of creep. It’s always O.K. to add $5.”

In protest of what he says are textbooks’ intolerably high prices — and the dumbing down of their content to appeal to the widest possible market — Professor McAfee has put his introductory economics textbook online free. He says he most likely could have earned a $100,000 advance on the book had he gone the traditional publishing route, and it would have had a list price approaching $200.

“This market is not working very well — except for the shareholders in the textbook publishers,” he said. “We have lots of knowledge, but we are not getting it out.”

Of course only lunatics like me give their books away for free. Because if you write something worth reading you should get paid a lot of money for it.* That is why no prestigious colleges will use his text book for their classes. Only places like Harvard.

And MIT has so much booty that they just leave it lying around for people to plunder prodigiously.

Yar, I be gettin' me a masters, matey.

* Not that it is wrong to make money from selling your books. Considering the way the economy is going, you might consider trading your books for pot and beer instead. They'll be worth more. I hear Oklahoma has a booming underground alternative economy.