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They said that they will put him in the box again, if he isn't able to do what they want him to. Being in the box makes him feel terrible. You can't move, and it feels really bad when he can't move.
He chooses not to say anything when he sees the technician incorrectly set the wards surrounding the testing chamber.
The proctor says it's time to test Firecalling. A full force test. He doesn't see who it is – he just hears the voice. He complies, and puts out as much Fire as he can. His fire is black, rimmed and flecked with red.
An alarm sounds. The proctor says to stop.
He does not stop.
The proctor says to stop, now more urgently.
He does not stop.
The proctor says that if he doesn't stop, they'll bring out the ball.
He does not stop. And now, he uses his Metallurgy and and Windkeeping too.
The proctor stops, because the testing chamber has exploded. In fact, the whole of Alphazon's base on Mars has exploded.
He realizes what's happening and creates a bubble of air around him, even though he doesn't need air. Not anymore.
Is there anything left of the base? Is there anyone left?
The librarian gets out another book and has a look at it. "One of the big ones is OpenStax, a human organization run by Rice University on Earth, but there are others."
"Oh, sorry, I should rephrase my question. Why are there people that give out free textbooks?"
"So, this is a complicated question, but if nobody else comes in and just wants help finding a book, I can try to explain. The costs of making books are lower today than they've ever been, and as you know, machines which can store lots of information on them are getting pretty popular! A lot of 'free textbooks' actually just have free information, and we'll need to pay to get print copies, but that's very cheap. We can't get physical programming textbooks for free, for instance, but we can get them for cheap enough that it's worth it if anyone is interested."
"As for why people do this: Some people just have information they really want to share with everyone. The Watchers, for instance, believe that a powerful being they serve was involved in writing some books and probably wants lots of people to read them, so they give out lots of copies of those books. They care so much that they even pay for the printing costs! And this isn't a textbook, but businesses want potential customers to know about them, so they'll often put together lists of all their products, or team up to make a directory of businesses, because they think this will improve sales."
"As for other cases… Sometimes people know they'll want to hire a lot of, say, necromancers in the future, and they think there aren't enough necromancers around, so they conclude if they make it easier to learn necromancy there will be more practitioners. Sometimes people have resources and want to spend them on looking good to their peers – that's pretty common, actually – and their peers will think they are very generous and scholarly if they commission a textbook series on integral and differential calculus and share it with everyone. I think that's the premise behind OpenStax? And some people just want to teach for its own sake, and writing a book is a way of doing that, and profiting from a book is complicated, so they just put it up for free instead of dealing with that."
That is so good!!
"I am very happy that the equilibrium is such that free textbooks are a thing. I might try to make free textbooks myself, about Metallurgy.
Why is profiting from a book complicated? Do you not just sell it?"
"So, if you're selling a book, you need to prevent people from just copying the entire book and not paying you, which might mean preventing them from reading the whole book before they buy it, but you also need to convince people that your book is actually worth buying. There's a lot of ways people try to solve this problem, but I think that's the core."
"That does seem like a problem. Thank you for helping me and talking to me."
Alright. Conrad will now leave and...he doesn't actually have anything to do now. But he also isn't stuck in his room.
It is a very strange feeling.
He decides to go down to the lawn. Are there things happening at the lawn.
Some people are lying on blankets and chatting or reading or eating snacks, but that might not count as something happening.
It does count as something happening but none of them are activities he can straightforwardly join.
Does the lawn have any smooth paved areas? Or smooth hard surfaces in general.
He is going to instantiate his roller skates again and practice on the paved patio area. He tries doing pivots on one foot and succeeds!!...with liberal application of Windkeeping to maintain balance. It's very hard to do without Windkeeping.