Why is piracy of books in electronic format not an issue? Why don’t we find large volumes of PDFs of scanned books or cracked e-books on peer-to-peer file sharing networks? Why aren’t book publishers up in arms, suing book pirates left and right?

Book sharing isn’t rampant, but imagine if it were. Now… would we (as a society) really mind? Because people are stealing, fine, but also people are stealing books. There’s a little bit of cognitive dissonance in this.

Different but related topic: Why do book publishers get away with releasing a new edition of, say, math textbooks every year? My little brother at UCLA had to buy a new $100 textbook because the used edition from last year didn’t have the right homework problems or the right problem sets in the right order, or something like that. You’d think that for a subject like math, the 1950′s edition of the book would be just as good, as long as it didn’t require the use of a slide rule.