Just had to pay £160 for permission to reproduce two images from @bodleianlibs from a 400 year old book that's obviously out of copyright. For a scholarly monograph that will earn a profit of, oh, let's round it to £0.00

I have no problem paying a fee to cover the cost of photography and some of the overhead of running a photography dept. But we know this is not that.

For one thing, it cost £80 for print rights, and then another £80 for ebook rights, even though obviously no additional work was required.

For another thing, it costs more to reproduce in color than black and white, for no practical reason since of course the photos are all taken digitally and in full color.

And finally, this £180 charge did not even include any photography, it was just for the permission to reproduce images of a public domain work that I took myself!

My uni is rich and I have some funds for this so I can handle it. But it doesn't seem right, does it? What would the charge be just to cover the costs of doing the work, £10?

Most US libraries have gotten much better about this and have moved to free or nominal costs. I don't know why major UK libraries still do this. I can't believe it's a major revenue producer to profit off of academic researchers.