#But the people working in health insurance (ie loan sharks) easily make $150.000 or more as a comparison

[chantylay]

Okay so I’ve gone to two (2) USAmerican universities and here is how the library works. At my first university which was ~science prestigious~ we had about two to three copies of the textbooks for the major classes (sorry people doing quantum physics class) and that was it. One of the other 50,000 students at the university using it? Tough tatas. Also expect such textbooks to not be in good shape because a few thousand students a semester have to share 2 to 3 free textbooks. PDFs are a luxury you do not have. The universities digitising their collections would involve Paying Someone Money and US universities are more willing to build ~prestige buildings~ to look good to their donors before paying poorly paid student workers to use an industrial scanner for four hours a go, if their contracts with publishing companies even allow them to give you PDFs. Most textbook supply companies would also chew their own legs off before selling libraries an easily distributed PDF. The libraries are mostly physical copies, although normally they have a catalog so you can go look up what books they have and if by a miracle a PDF is available then you may email the low-paid student librarian workers. If your professor is really cool they will supply you with PDFs from their own book collection but this is usually against school policy and would count as Book Piracy. Piracy is your only way around this and usually the tech wizards in the class find a free online PDF very quickly but woe betide anyone who leaks this to a shitty professor or the administration. This usually only applies to Big textbooks for Big lecture classes, like Calculus, Organic Chemistry, Programming 201, and the like. Many Humanities classes don’t have textbooks and the professor just teaches, makes their own materials, or provides PDFs of mass-market materials. Maybe makes you buy Pride and Prejudice or something. What is the library for then? Looking scholastic for donors. People study in them. They also have books from the 80s, 90s, and 00s (hardcopy only) for (theoretically) research, and also a journal subscription so annual journal hardcopies can be found in the stacks if you go looking. On the journal websites, depending on how prestigious the university is, you might be able to log in with your university account and look at the journals for free. My current university has basically none of these that aren’t for biology papers, much to my chagrin, so I can’t look up all the cool peer reviewed archaeology facts. In essence the library is basically a quietish study area and computer/printer bank with a bunch of outdated books in them that are there because a university should Have A Library and not because that library is functional, modern, or useful for anything beyond computer access and study space. The librarians are usually the sweetest people and really like to help you find things though. Professors basically assign books based on what the administration allows them to set. If their own work is relevant, peer reviewed, and passes the sniff test then they can set whatever they like, but for Big classes, normally the university assigns the textbook based on whatever contract they have with a publisher to make the textbooks 10% cheaper. Students are simply expected to buy the books demanded of them, and usually there is some manner of local bookstore or internet service set up (with that 10% discount) to supply textbooks more easily, and you are allowed to pay for textbooks using student loans. Usually professors assigning their own books is along the lines of ‘I wrote a peer reviewed field-relevant book on worm biology with three of my colleagues and we are working from this book in the worm biology class because I can’t be arsed to find another one’, rather than ‘I literally wrote Calculus 101 and am making you buy it’. Aside from the fact that Calculus 101 textbook guy is too rich to teach. Textbook publishers price things like the Calculus 101 textbook at US$200 (US$80 for PDF) due to the absolute monopolies created by US higher education publishers. The writers of the Calculus 101 textbook are the people who have thousands of citations to their name, get buildings named after them, and are making money hand over fist on 10-15% royalties from the publisher. Their books are the ones included in the big university-publisher contracts. There are very few of these people. James Stewart is one example, who wrote one of the calculus textbooks that half the universities basically everywhere use, and had a house worth CA$30 million. The more niche peer reviewed books are more like US$30-50, whose writers might be ordinary professors. The writers of said books are usually paid a flat fee for writing it for these, with 5-10% royalties if they’re well-published or the publisher thinks the book will do well. So that textbook makes maybe US$20,000-$50,000 per year for the professor, and if the university allows them to assign it to their own 200 students, they might make US$1,000 maximum from them, or just more than half one month’s rent in a major city. Generally this is not seen as an ethics violation by the people who crank up tuition every year so the university chancellor can be paid $500,000 for doing sweet fa and so the university can spend more money on vanity projects. As an example on price disparities: my Assyrian-Hittite cuneiform textbook (because basically the only people who would even buy a cuneiform textbook are already academics and so it isn’t as price-gauged) is US$40. My Russian textbook by contrast would’ve been US$300 if I didn’t get it on sale, but is probably the best textbook of its kind on the US market and was written by a pair of eighty year old Russian professors who basically reinvented the field of Russian-language teaching in the United States in the 80s.

Okay I have a question about American universities, which I do not understand on general principles, and university libraries, which I do not understand in this context.

Here's how it works for my students:

As part of the £9000 a year they're paying, they get access to full library resources. I, at the start of each academic year, make sure the reading list for each module - both essential and supplementary - is up to date, meaning the library has copies (preferably online forms, with hard copies only if a PDF is unavailable)

The library also has subscriptions to pretty much every major journal going, so they are able to access most journals with their uni login. If they happen across, and need, something they can't access, they put in a request with the library for it. A ninja librarian will perform the sacrament, and a PDF is in your inbox two days later (I am hazy on the mechanism of this part, but not the result). You have up to ten requests per person per year.

How in the world do I see posts from Americans so very often talking about paying for textbooks? Like... I get that it's "Shitty lecturers want to force students to buy their personal textbook for cash monies", but what do those university libraries actually Do?

(Also as a side note I am filled with helpless laughter at the very IDEA that I would (a) be allowed to set my own book as not just essential but fundamental course reading in a field that is well researched HELLO BIAS AND FRAUD and (b) allowed to set any text as required reading that would disadvantage impoverished students HELLO INEQUALITY AND ALSO PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS VIOLATION without the university's academic office arranging for a bed of hot coals to haul me over.)