跟读练习: Why is knowledge getting so expensive? | Jeffrey Edmunds | TEDxPSU - 通过YouTube学习英语口语
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Tanya Cushman Reviewer Imagine you work in a library,
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Tanya Cushman Reviewer Imagine you work in a library,
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and one day a van pulls up in front of your building,
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several people get out, they come into your library,
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and they show you a list.
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And they say, according to our records,
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you no longer have access to these 5,432 books.
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They march into your stacks,
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pull those books off the shelves,
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load them in the van, and drive off.
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What just happened?
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It looks like theft, right?
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Strangers coming unannounced into your library and making off with a significant chunk of your collection.
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My name is Jeff Edmonds,
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and I do work in a library.
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I've been with the Penn State Libraries here well over half my life.
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And I can tell you that as bizarre as that scenario sounds,
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it plays out in essence every single day,
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not only here at Penn State,
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but at libraries all over the country as the result of the shift in our collections from books to e-books.
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Quick show of hands, how many of you have ever purchased a book?
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I hope everyone in the audience.
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Now, how many of you have ever purchased an e-book?
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Would it surprise you to learn that you didn't purchase an e-book?
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That it's impossible to buy an e-book?
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To understand why, we have to look at U.S copyright law.
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Specifically, the part of the law that codifies what you can and cannot do with the book that you've purchased.
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When you buy a book,
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that book becomes your personal property.
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You own it.
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You can do whatever you want with it.
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You can even resell it.
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And if you do resell it,
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you get all the money.
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The copyright holder, be it the author or the publisher,
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has no claim on that sale.
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Now imagine if that were true for e-books.
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Imagine if you could buy and resell an e-book the same way you can buy and resell a print book.
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We all know that it's infinitely easier to create copies of and distribute copies of digital objects,
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like an e-book, compared to a print object, like a physical book.
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So as the internet became a thing,
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publishers realized they faced a crisis.
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If consumers could buy and resell e-books the same way we can buy and resell print books,
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their profit margins would evaporate and the publishing industry would collapse.
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So what did they do?
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They made a very astute decision.
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they decided to not sell ebooks.
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So when you clicked on buy it,
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what you were paying for was not that ebook.
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You do not own that ebook.
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You were merely buying a license to access that text.
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Now if this distinction between buying
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and owning outright a print book versus paying for a license to access an e-book seems minor to us as individual consumers.
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For libraries, like the one here at Penn State where I work,
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that collect millions of e-books,
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this distinction has profound and unsettling implications.
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Let's start with the sense of scale.
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This is the library's catalog.
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We currently have about 10 million items.
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Of those, more than 6 million are online.
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They're digital.
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They're ebooks.
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Fewer than 4 million are actual physical books in the stacks.
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So already, the majority of our collections are online.
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They're ebooks.
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And because they're ebooks, they're not owned in the same way our print collections are.
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They're subject to licensing.
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And because they're merely licensed, they're subject to removal.
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Every month, we're compelled to remove thousands,
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tens of thousands, and some months even hundreds of thousands of e-books from our catalog.
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This is the van pulling up in front of our building and making off with a chunk of our collection,
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which begs the question, who's driving the van?
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If libraries don't own and control their e-book collections, who does?
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The simple answer is publishers.
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And in the realm of scholarly publishing,
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the kind of publishing that concerns us in an environment like Penn State,
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there are five publishers that control the marketplace.
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It's an oligopoly.
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And because they control the marketplace,
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they leverage their advantage in several different ways.
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First, the cost of e-books is artificially high.
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On average, it costs more to license an e-book than it does to buy a print book outright.
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Second, the cost of ebooks over the past several decades has risen much faster than the rate of inflation.
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Third, publishers compel libraries to sign contracts that include non-disclosure clauses so that we can't discuss prices with our peer institutions.
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Penn State, for example, can't go to the University of Michigan or Rutgers or UCLA and ask,
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how much did you pay for this package of e-books?
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We have no way of determining what a fair market price is.
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Fourth, publishers bundle their content together so that we're compelled to license thousands
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and even tens of thousands of e-books that we neither want nor need.
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Imagine you're in the grocery store and you go into the cereal aisle
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and you pull your favorite cereal off the shelf and put it in your cart.
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And a clerk at the end of the aisle says,
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what are you doing?
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You say, well, I'm buying this cereal.
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And they say, no, no,
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no, you can't do that.
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Store policy is that you have to buy one of each.
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It's absurd, right?
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And yet that's what publishers are doing to libraries,
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forcing us to end up with thousands of things we neither want nor need.
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Now, this very uneven, unfair relationship becomes even more absurdist when you consider where the knowledge comes from that populates these e-books.
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Who's creating this knowledge?
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Well, in a word, we are.
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This is how scholarly publishing works.
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Scholars do research.
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They write manuscripts.
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Those manuscripts are passed to peers, who then make comments.
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The comments are passed back to the authors,
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who then revise their manuscripts to improve them.
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And then ultimately, an editor or an editorial board decides that this manuscript is worthy of publication,
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say as an ebook or as an article in a scholarly journal.
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Now note that all of the intellectual labor I just described,
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from start to finish, is done at universities.
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The salaries of these people are paid for by universities.
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And how are universities funded?
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Well, three ways of primary importance.
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First, First, tuition monies.
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So if you're a student paying tuition,
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your money is being used in part to fund this enterprise of knowledge creation.
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Second, taxpayer dollars.
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Like many institutions, Penn State is a public university.
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We depend on money from the Commonwealth every year for our operating budget.
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So here you have taxpayer dollars being used to fund this enterprise of knowledge creation.
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Third, grant monies.
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While some grants can originate from a private individual or private enterprise,
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the vast majority have a strong publicly funded component.
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So again, public funds being used to fund this enterprise of knowledge creation.
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So we've funded this process,
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we've done the work, we've created the knowledge,
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and then what do we do with our manuscript?
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We hand it off to one of these publishers,
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who then license it back to us at enormous cost.
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The libraries here at Penn State spent over 13 million dollars on ebooks and other electronic resources last year.
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Even the dire straits in which higher education finds itself,
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we know for example that Penn State just a couple of years ago was facing a $142 million budget deficit.
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This ecosystem makes no economic sense.
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It's a broken system.
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What could we do to correct it?
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Well, what if we thought of our knowledge,
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the knowledge that we collectively fund and create,
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not as a private commodity to be handed off to some third party,
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but as a public good?
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What if we thought of it in the same light that we think of good roads,
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sound bridges, a dependable electrical grid, clean air, clean water?
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What would that look like in practice in this context?
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Well, first of all, we could say goodbye to these publishers.
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They need us because we do all the work.
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We don't need them.
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Here's an example.
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This is a scholarly journal known as Lingua.
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It's published by Elsevier.
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Elsevier is the largest of those five publishers.
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Their profits last year exceeded $2 billion.
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An annual subscription to Lingua costs a library over $2,500.
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About a decade ago, the editors of Lingua,
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led by the executive editor,
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a Belgian linguist by the name of Johan Roerich, decided to walk.
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They said goodbye to Elsevier because they were disgusted with its pricing models.
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They left and they started their own journal, Glossa.
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Same topic, linguistics, same quality, same editors.
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Except, unlike Lingua, Glossa is free.
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It's what we call open access.
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Open access literature is literature that's freely available online and free of all or nearly all licensing restrictions.
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If we expand that concept of open access to something else that's of vital importance to an environment like Penn State,
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textbooks, we end up with what are called open educational resources or OER.
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We know that the cost of textbooks has risen over a thousand percent in the past 40 years,
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and the prices of textbooks continue to rise at a rate three times the rate of inflation.
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Research we've done locally at Penn State has shown us that over half of Penn State students,
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65% have elected not to buy a textbook because it was too expensive.
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And nearly a third, 31%,
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have elected not to take a course because the materials were too expensive.
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This is the open textbook library in the library's catalog.
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It's a collection of over 1,500 textbooks in all disciplines that are freely available online.
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They're free and they're freely adaptable.
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By that, I mean that
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if a Penn State professor were to find a textbook in this collection that was perfectly suited to their course,
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except for, let's say, two chapters,
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they could remove those chapters or rewrite them and upload their version of the textbook
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to make it freely available to their students.
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As a sustainable model, this sure beats the heck out of asking every student in every section of those courses
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to shell out 75 or 100 or $150 for a textbook that they will probably never use after that course completes.
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If we expand that notion to its broadest possible application,
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we end up with this.
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For several years now, the libraries have been working assiduously to identify,
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to locate, to make discoverable resources that are not controlled by publishers,
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that are freely available online, free to read.
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These are things that are not behind a paywall.
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You don't need to authenticate as a Penn State user to look at them.
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They will still be accessible to you after you leave Penn State.
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In fact, they're accessible now to anyone with internet access.
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The number currently stands at over 1,200,000,
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and we expect to see this number rise as we continue our work.
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As I said at the beginning,
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I've been with the libraries for well over half of my life, over 35 years.
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And I've come to believe that libraries are a fundamental pillar of democracy.
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Democracy demands an informed citizenry.
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And informed citizens must have free and equitable and open access to information and to knowledge,
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especially the knowledge that we've collectively funded and created.
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Knowledge is not a private commodity to be handed off to some third party.
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Knowledge is a public good,
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and it must be treated as such.
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Thank you.
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语法与表达的背景分析
在这段演讲中，演讲者使用了几种重要的语法结构和表达方式，帮助观众更好地理解核心观点：
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- 主动语态与被动语态: 演讲中频繁使用主动语态，使得信息传达清晰而有力，比如“他们显示给你一份清单”。这样可以增强演讲的紧迫感和可信度。
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