Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair enough, 49 countries of the almost 200 on the planet have Inter-Library loans. Seems it may be about on-par with how many countries / populations are without internet access. However, if we were to measure how much of the 49 countries' population truly had reasonable access to a library (within reasonable distance of their home) versus the total population who has access to the internet, I think we'd probably se…
"I think we'd probably see that the internet is a far more sustainable, cheaper medium through which to transfer information." Absolutely true. Yet not that relevant. Data transfer cost isn't a major factor. The journals in my fields are all electronic. They no longer have paper distributions. As a result, the library no longer needs to store a physical copy, and people can retrieve a copy from their office instead o…
I think, from the little I have read about this (with regard to the issues we've discussed here), academics in general is kind of screwed up given the power structures in place.
This might sound like a broad generalization, and perhaps counter-intuitive, but I think for academic institutions to optimize themselves, they need to be thinking about how to re-arrange the incentive structure to align with incentives that drive a professor to write books and not with incentive structure of the markets. For example I think within the realm of academics it makes total sense to move toward a "pay for the person, not the product" model.
With electronic distribution of the media, you get almost zero-cost of production and distribution (except of course for the time the author spends writing the book). This theoretically allows the industry to figure out how to cut the middle men and move those savings to the "talent" instead of finding more ways to bureaucratize the system further, eating away at the salaries of those who are producing the material in the first place. However, given the power structure my hunch is without an "(r)evolution" within those industries professors will continue to get a fraction of what they deserve.