Sometimes I think if publishers could get away with charging us the same prices for print books as they do for ebooks, they would. No question.

"Multiple people can access it at once, that's why it's more expensive!" they say about ebooks. Sure, if we bought the unlimited licence ebook, but most of the time we can't afford that. With 1-user, only one person at a time can access it. Same with a print book.

"As soon as they're done someone else can use it." Same with a print book. If we made a print book 24-hour loan 365 students a year could theoretically use it. If it's reference-only, who knows how many people may use it? So why does anticipated usage not govern the price there?

"Ebooks have additional functionality" they say. Nothing that accessibility software doesn't already provide, except usually not as good, and helpfully the DRM embedded in ebooks blocks most accessibility software from working, forcing students to use the inferior embedded tools.

The ebooks themselves? PDFs. Nothing more. No live links, no interactive content, no videos, references aren't clickable, a lot of the time the images aren't even in colour.

As for exercising your rights under the various copyright exceptions, forget it. With a print book you can copy a reasonable amount, if you prefer to read offline. With most ebooks this is restricted to 5% and some 0%, but you can't break the DRM in order to exercise your rights!

With a print book, it's ours. Ours to keep. We can do what we want with it, sell it on if we want to. With ebooks we lease access, and that access can be revoked, or have to be renewed yearly. That ebook can be withdrawn from sale or the supplier go bust.

And of course, this is all assuming the book in question is even available as an ebook for libraries to buy, extortionate price notwithstanding. It might be on Kindle, or Google Play Books, or Apple Books - a student might be able to buy it, but not the library.

Let's not forget, most of these books are written by academics who work for the same institutions as these libraries. Most of the research is funded by those institutions, or government, or research bodies. Writing and publishing is part of their job. And their cut? 5-10%, maybe.

A library can frequently pay hundreds of pounds to access an ebook written by an academic at their own institution - which paid for the time, the research, the facilities, and then has to pay AGAIN for the students to access that finished product.

Of course, I'm ranting about ebooks, but this is the same issue across the whole of academic publishing. Journal publishing is even more of a racket. Nobody gets paid there at all except these same academic publishing companies. Profit founded on the exploitation of universities.

We are constantly hearing about value for money in HE, about what university costs & why & who pays - yet no-one in authority seems to care about this outrageous issue of public money & student fees being siphoned straight into the pockets of massive publishing conglomerates.

Why should a huge publishing company get access to university output and research for free when our own students don't? How does commercial profit outweigh the public good of education and society's free access to scholarly knowledge?