Here is the full transcript of Jeffrey Edmunds’ talk titled “Why Is Knowledge Getting So Expensive?” at TEDxPSU, November 16, 2025.
The Library Theft That Happens Every Day
JEFFREY EDMUNDS: Imagine you work in a library, and one day, a van pulls up in front of your building, several people get out, they come into your library and they show you a list. And they say, “According to our records, you no longer have access to these 5,432 books.” They march into your stacks, pull those books off the shelves, load them in the van, and drive off.
What just happened? It looks like theft, right? Strangers coming unannounced into your library and making off with a significant chunk of your collection.
My name is Jeff Edmunds, and I do work in a library. I’ve been with the Penn State Libraries here well over half my life, and I can tell you that as bizarre as that scenario sounds, it plays out in essence every single day, not only here at Penn State, but at libraries all over the country as the result of the shift in our collections from books to e-books.
You Don’t Actually Own Your E-Books
Quick show of hands, how many of you have ever purchased a book? I hope everyone in the audience. Now, how many of you have ever purchased an e-book? Would it surprise you to learn that you didn’t purchase an e-book? That it’s impossible to buy an e-book?
To understand why, we have to look at U.S. copyright law, specifically the part of the law that codifies what you can and cannot do with a book that you’ve purchased. When you buy a book, that book becomes your personal property. You own it. You can do whatever you want with it. You can even resell it, and if you do resell it, you get all the money. The copyright holder, be it the author or the publisher, has no claim on that sale.
Now, imagine if that were true for e-books. Imagine if you could buy and resell an e-book the same way you can buy and resell a print book. We all know that it’s infinitely easier to create copies of and distribute copies of digital objects, like an e-book, compared to a print object, like a physical book. So as the Internet became a thing, publishers realized they faced a crisis. If consumers could buy and resell e-books the same way we can buy and resell print books, their profit margins would evaporate and the publishing industry would collapse.
So what did they do? They made a very astute decision. They decided to not sell e-books. So when you clicked on “buy it,” what you were paying for was not that e-book. You do not own that e-book. You were merely buying a license to access that text.
The Crisis Facing Research Libraries
Now, this distinction between buying and owning outright a print book versus paying for a license to access an e-book seems minor to us as individual consumers. For libraries, like the one here at Penn State where I work, that collect millions of e-books, this distinction has profound and unsettling implications.
Let’s start with the sense of scale. This is the library’s catalog. We currently have about 10 million items. Of those, more than 6 million are online. They’re digital. They’re e-books. Fewer than 4 million are actual physical books in the stacks. So already the majority of our collections are online. They’re e-books. And because they’re e-books, they’re not owned in the same way our print collections are. They’re subject to licensing. And because they’re merely licensed, they’re subject to removal.
Every month, we’re compelled to remove thousands, tens of thousands, and some months even hundreds of thousands of e-books from our catalog. This is the van pulling up in front of our building and making off with a chunk of our collection, which begs the question, who’s driving the van?
The Publisher Oligopoly
If libraries don’t own and control their e-book collections, who does? The simple answer is publishers. And in the realm of scholarly publishing, the kind of publishing that concerns us in an environment like Penn State, there are five publishers that control the marketplace. It’s an oligopoly. And because they control the marketplace, they leverage their advantage in several different ways. First, the cost of e-books is artificially high.
On average, it costs more to license an e-book than it does to buy a print book outright. Second, the cost of e-books over the past several decades has risen much faster than the rate of inflation. Third, publishers compel libraries to sign contracts that include non-disclosure clauses so that we can’t discuss prices with our peer institutions. Penn State, for example, can’t go to the University of Michigan or Rutgers or UCLA and ask, “How much did you pay for this package of e-books?” We have no way of determining what a fair market price is. Fourth, publishers bundle their content together so that we’re compelled to license thousands and even tens of thousands of e-books that we neither want nor need.
Imagine you’re in the grocery store and you go into the cereal aisle and you pull your favorite cereal off the shelf and put it in your cart. And a clerk at the end of the aisle says, “What are you doing?” You say, “Well, I’m buying this cereal.” And they say, “No, no, no, you can’t do that. Store policy is that you have to buy one of each.” It’s absurd, right? And yet that’s what publishers are doing to libraries, forcing us to end up with thousands of things we neither want nor need.
Who Creates the Knowledge?
Now this very uneven, unfair relationship becomes even more absurdist when you consider where the knowledge comes from that populates these e-books. Who’s creating this knowledge? Well, in a word, we are. This is how scholarly publishing works.
Scholars do research. They write manuscripts. Those manuscripts are passed to peers who then make comments. The comments are passed back to the authors who then revise their manuscripts to improve them and then ultimately an editor or an editorial board decides that this manuscript is worthy of publication, say as an e-book or as an article in a scholarly journal.
Now note that all of the intellectual labor I just described, from start to finish, is done at universities. The salaries of these people are paid for by universities. And how are universities funded? Well, three ways of primary importance. First, tuition money. So if you’re a student paying tuition, your money is being used in part to fund this enterprise of knowledge creation. Second, taxpayer dollars. Like many institutions, Penn State is a public university. We depend on money from the Commonwealth every year for our operating budget. So here you have taxpayer dollars being used to fund this enterprise of knowledge creation. Third, grant monies. While some grants can originate from a private individual or private enterprise, the vast majority have a strong publicly funded component. So again, public funds being used to fund this enterprise of knowledge creation.
So we’ve funded this process, we’ve done the work, we’ve created the knowledge, and then what do we do with our manuscript? We hand it off to one of these publishers who then license it back to us at enormous cost. The libraries here at Penn State spent over $13 million on e-books and other electronic resources last year. Given the dire straits in which higher education finds itself, we know, for example, that Penn State just a couple of years ago was facing a $142 million budget deficit. This ecosystem makes no economic sense. It’s a broken system.
Knowledge as a Public Good
What could we do to correct it? Well, what if we thought of our knowledge, the knowledge that we collectively fund and create, not as a private commodity to be handed off to some third party, but as a public good? What if we thought of it in the same light that we think of good roads, sound bridges, a dependable electrical grid, clean air, clean water? What would that look like in practice in this context?
Well, first of all, we could say goodbye to these publishers. They need us because we do all the work. We don’t need them. Here’s an example. This is a scholarly journal known as Lingua. It’s published by Elsevier. Elsevier is the largest of those five publishers. Their profits last year exceeded $2 billion. An annual subscription to Lingua costs the library over $2,500.
About a decade ago, the editors of Lingua, led by the executive editor, a Belgian linguist by the name of Johan Rooryck, decided to walk. They said goodbye to Elsevier because they were disgusted with its pricing models. They left and they started their own journal, Glossa. Same topic, linguistics, same quality, same editors, except unlike Lingua, Glossa is free. It’s what we call open access.
Open Access and Educational Resources
Open access literature is literature that’s freely available online and free of all or nearly all licensing restrictions. If we expand that concept of open access to something else that’s of vital importance to an environment like Penn State, textbooks, we end up with what are called open educational resources or OER.
We know that the cost of textbooks has risen over 1,000% in the past 40 years and the prices of textbooks continue to rise at a rate three times the rate of inflation. Research we’ve done locally at Penn State has shown us that over half of Penn State students, 65%, have elected not to buy a textbook because it was too expensive and nearly a third, 31%, have elected not to take a course because the materials were too expensive.
This is the open textbook library in the library’s catalog. It’s a collection of over 1,500 textbooks in all disciplines that are freely available online. They’re free and they’re freely adaptable. By that I mean that if a Penn State professor were to find a textbook in this collection that was perfectly suited to their course except for let’s say two chapters, they could remove those chapters or rewrite them and upload their version of the textbook to make it freely available to their students.
As a sustainable model, this sure beats the heck out of asking every student in every section of those courses to shell out $75 or $100 or $150 for a textbook that they will probably never use after that course completes.
Beyond Paywalls: Free Access to Knowledge
If we expand that notion to its broadest possible application, we end up with this. For several years now, the libraries have been working assiduously to identify, to locate, to make discoverable resources that are not controlled by publishers, that are freely available online, free to read. These are things that are not behind a paywall. You don’t need to authenticate as a Penn State user to look at them. They will still be accessible to you after you leave Penn State. In fact, they’re accessible now to anyone with internet access. The number currently stands at over 1,200,000, and we expect to see this number rise as we continue our work.
As I said at the beginning, I’ve been with the libraries for well over half my life, over 35 years, and I’ve come to believe that libraries are a fundamental pillar of democracy. Democracy demands an informed citizenry, and informed citizens must have free and equitable and open access to information and to knowledge, especially the knowledge that we’ve collectively funded and created.
Knowledge is not a private commodity to be handed off to some third party. Knowledge is the public good, and it must be treated as such. Thank you.
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