"Objecting to this grotesque situation shouldn’t be an ideological issue, by the way. There’s something here to hate for everybody. If you’re on the left, you’ll probably detest on principle the for-profit gatekeeping of knowledge (and most often publicly funded knowledge at that). And if you’re on the right you’ll have no time for a market that isn’t behaving like a market so much as like a cartel, with producers and consumers captive to a price-fixing, profit-skimming middleman. The business model isn’t one out of Hayek or Friedman: it belongs to Enver Hoxha’s Albania."