Academics spend years writing books nobody will buy. That's practically the definition of academic writing. They go into incredible amount of depths for a very, very niche audience: other academics interested in, e.g., the experience of women in Japanese detective novels of the 19th century. (n.b. Actually a book, assuming I am remembering all the details correctly. An advisor spent years on it.)
This is exactly the result the market should hope for: a profitable method which gets academics to write down very-incredibly-niche ideas and then put copies of them exactly where someone would expect to find very-incredibly-niche ideas. The alternative to these $150 books is not $7.50 books. It is "no book." They do not meaningfully trade off with equally-in-depth blog posts, because academics are not scored on, and hence do not as a matter of practice actually sit down and write, book-length blog posts.
I think you drastically overestimate the quality of the books this article talks about. These publishers will publish any rubbish you give them just to profit from selling to librarians who do not understand enough of the subject matter to know they are being scammed.
I've been contacted on Facebook by these scam publishers, inquiring if I'd like to publish some of my university essays.
There are plenty of alternatives. Most of the niche knowledge is distributed via scientific journals and conference proceedings. And many scientific publishers will happily publish books on any obscure topic, if you pay for printing.
Scientific publishing has plenty of problems, but these kinds of "publishers" are the worst; they leech off already stretched library budgets for short term profits without providing any value to society at all.
I don't think we disagree very much about the likely level of subject-specific due diligence these publishers will do. I think we disagree very much about the likely level of subject-specific due diligence done by any publisher on any title picked at random from a university library.
Peer review is, like Santa, a story we tell to motivate little children; academics (particularly in the humanities) are their own QC departments.
And many scientific publishers will happily publish books on any obscure topic, if you pay for printing.
I feel like I have to say "I do not understand the relevance of this fact to the claim that the academic press is a staunch bulwark against incorrect facts receiving its imprimatur."
I agree that a lot of low quality work is published even with peer review. But I don't think publishers should be gatekeepers; it's generally impossible to judge the quality of academic work without being heavily invested in the field yourself.
So I don't have a problem with publishing rubbish as long as you pay for it yourself.
What I do have a problem with is that these people try to collect anything that they can get their fingers on, put an ISBN on it, and then sell it to libraries at horrendous prices.
This is not about making knowledge accessible, this is solely about scraping a bit off library budgets with the least amount of effort.
Even if you're cynical about peer review, there is a world of difference between a publisher that sends manuscripts to subject experts that it identifies on its own and a publisher that (as in the article) asks the author if they have any friends who could take care of the reviewing.
I've served as a reviewer for textbook chapters before. Maybe I'm the exception, but I took that responsibility seriously (and sent at least one back with a "don't even think of publishing this without a complete rewrite" response).
I think it's pretty clear from context that the author is referring to junk scholarship, or something pretty close to it.
If a book really is written and then forgotten by the world, it was never a serious part of the discussion. And a discussion, however small, is what academia is.
I don't think we disagree very much about the likely level of subject-specific due diligence these publishers will do
Which publishers? If this is a real problem, there might be real solutions but those won't be found if we are busy debating narratives without digging down into the details.
As an academic I check out and buy super specialized books all the time. $150 is not too expensive if it can save me a few hours of work by summarizing an esoteric topic, which frequently is the case. The publisher doesn't matter, just the reputation of the author.
This is not beach reading, it is an input to an industrial process.
It's weird, because HN is usually the first place to downvote people into oblivion for complaining about how outrageous it is that B2B App X costs $15 per month when the majority of software aimed at consumers now sells for 99 cents or is given away for free.
B2B App X generally doesn't have the unique content or extremely niche audience of the hardback, heavily revised version of one's Phd thesis either.
Perhaps because HN readers think they can write equivalent B2B software in a weekend and monetize the result through ads, in-app purchases, and gamification, while they don't think they can write a book or good documentation that others would pay for?
These books have free minimum prices, $15 or so suggested prices, and do very well for their authors -- both by royalties earned and by number of copies sold.
The key point here is that if you're typically earning $10 or more in royalties (yes, royalties) per paid book sale, then a few thousand book sales can add up to being meaningful, fast. And yes, this can even happen with academic books that have a free minimum price...
The book you list as your #1 book is most certainly not an 'academic' book. Just because a book is written by an academic, does not make it an academic book. Just the byline gives it away ("A Guide for Anyone Who Works with Data"), but the description even more so: "This book describes, simply and in general terms, the process of analyzing data. ... This book is a distillation of their experience in a format that is applicable to both practitioners and managers in data science. "
In other words, "we've written down our experiences as applied statisticians". Which is fine and actually it sounds like it would be useful for me, but it's not "academic publishing".
That has little to do with the fact that they are ebooks, and everything to do with the fact that they are about data science. Just about the sexiest 'academic' topic right now, and in extremely high demand outside academia. For the vast majority of academic books, there is simply little or no demand.
Data science is not a niche academic field by any means. It's a high-growth employment sector with probably tens of thousands of practitioners interested.
Of the 30 books on the front page of your bestselling list, the closest things to an 'academic book' I see are all texts designed to accompany Coursera courses.
Those aren't academic books, those are introductory text books.
I should have been more precise: yes, they are introductory textbooks which accompany courses. I was defining academic as "it's a textbook of any level" not "it's graduate level only".
Leanpub has also been used to publish work based on dissertations (which is as academic as it gets), and those works obviously have far fewer sales.
I would wager that the cost of printing is not what is setting the high prices for these books. Short-run publishing is quite economical these days. It's the overhead cost of running these organizations -- sales forces to sell to libraries, editors, proofreaders, marketing folks, etc.
Switching to e-book will save very little of that money.
Sure, it allows for self-publishing, but a self-published Ebook is not going to look great on your CV, and the royalties are not going to matter much if only a few hundred people are interested in the topic.
I think Leanpub has a ways to go before it can be useful for academic writing in my field (mathematics and theoretical computer science).
My personal experience: I've tried using Leanpub and found issues with the way it handles mathematics. For example, the last time I checked (maybe around June) the TeX support in their Markdown was not developed enough to handle aligned equations, which is a big sticking point for me and I think for most mathematicians.
The standard process for academic writers is to typeset an entire book themselves in LaTeX regardless of the publisher (they tend not to publish-as-they-write, though that could conceivably change). Leanpub is unlikely to convince book authors in math by forcing them to convert to Markdown, especially for book writing when cross-chapter labels for theorems and exercises are common. If Leanpub wants to attract academic writers in math they need a sturdy tool that converts a LaTeX book to the Markdown flavor that Leanpub needs. But that's a crap-ton of work (especially considering third-party libraries like tikz) with an unclear contribution to Leanpub's bottom line.
Of course, the alternative is to post only a pdf format, but that kind of defeats the point of Leanpub which is that they generate multiple formats. A service like gumroad would be cheaper per transaction.
You're correct that we're more expensive per transaction than Gumroad, which is an excellent service. Now, for some books, the amount earned above the minimum price is more than enough to make up the difference: our price sliders work really well to earn extra money for authors. The Leanpub vs. Gumroad question is actually a really interesting one; there are other considerations on both sides. (Gumroad is what I recommend for authors who don't find Leanpub a good fit. I know that authors like Nathan Barry make a killing using their own sites for the marketing and Gumroad for the selling.)
You're also correct that one of the main points of Leanpub is the one-click "make all the formats and sell them" approach. We do offer PDF upload for authors who find Leanpub's workflow preferable to more DIY sites like Gumroad.
Specifically, in terms of LaTeX support: we do support LaTeX math, but you're correct that there are some limitations. I'm not sure if the work we're doing on Markua (https://leanpub.com/markua) will help with this or not. I think that it will help with some of it (making equations into figures and referencing them from other places), but not others (probably the alignment isn't good enough). I'd really appreciate it if you could contact me with specifics if you want...
One thing that's immediate: the only math typesetting language serious math writers ever use is LaTeX, and I think in terms of "math mode" support it would be enough to fully support whatever subset of tex syntax is supported on sites frequented heavily by mathematicians, specifically mathoverflow.com (I believe it's MathJax with some extensions for special scripts and diagrams like [1]). It seems like the technology to get TeX->HTML is already there at mathoverflow, so I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to avoid reinventing the wheel.
The other things are less math specific and more organizationally specific. If I were writing a serious academic math text, it would be full of theorems, corollaries, and exercises which I would refer to in later chapters by a label. For example you might put some simple but tedious computation as an exercise in an earlier chapter and then when using the result in a later proof you can say "The claim that BLAH is Exercise II.4.3." Leanpub appears to currently only have support for figure labels, but in math we often want labels for these other things too, which we can then reference across the entire book. In TeX, anything that is assigned a number can also be assigned a label.
Serious math texts also have a need for bibliographies at the end of each chapter and at the end of the book, and if there's anything a writer doesn't want to do it's alphabetize and manage labels for a hundred references. We have BibTeX for this, but Leanpub appears to have nothing. One could write a tool that translates bibtex output to markdown, but again it's a lot of work.
> The alternative to these $150 books is not $7.50 books. It is "no book."
I disagree. One alternative, for instance, is online publication of a .pdf. These are available to anyone, regardless of location, time zone, or ability to pay.
Are you the same Jim Hefferon who wrote the free (as in freedom and beer) linear algebra text [0]? If so, I'd first like to thank you (your book is great) and then agree that it is possible to publish a .pdf online.
That said, patio11 is talking about writing books in highly specialised academic areas. Linear algebra is standard fare for an undergraduate curriculum - taught at thousands of universities - using innumerable textbooks. So it is not something highly specialised. It is conceivable that your book was largely inspired by other linear algebra books, if indirectly. For instance, you might have had strong opinions about why a particular approach does not work [1], and chose not to follow it. The search space has been reduced by authors who have come before. An academic writing a book in a more specialised area would probably not have the luxury of a writing precedent and would have to figure out a lot themselves. This translates to more time spent on a book for which they would otherwise receive no reward.
Of course, it is possible that this premise is false and that it is easier for a researcher to write a book on their own research specialty.
I would imagine that your research appeals to 'a very, very niche audience'. Would you consider spending a lot of time and effort on a book (.pdf) in your research area - for no material reward? To be read by a very small audience? Orders of magnitude smaller than undergraduates looking for a good linear algebra text?
Yes. Linear Algebra with answers to exercises and lab manual, and an Introduction to Proofs that a person can find referenced on that page.
> Would you consider spending a lot of time and effort on a book (.pdf) in your research area - for no material reward? To be read by a very small audience? Orders of magnitude smaller than undergraduates looking for a good linear algebra text?
I am saying that people can put the books discussed in the article online. The fact that they are niche, or not, does not seem especially relevant, to me. I spent thousands of hours on the text; it is a professional activity that I think has helped people. The last I checked LA gets about 30K downloads per week, but even a book for specialists that gets 10 downloads per week could live online.
In academia, the great majority of authors do not get money from a book that in any way comes close to the effort involved, in my experience. It is a professional activity for most. The publisher in this article may make a good living but the authors do not, again in my experience.
I have nothing against traditional publishing but I think online is an alternative.
I do think, though, that there needs to be a way to curate and review the works. They need to be gathered online in some kind of CTAN-like thing because, among other things, busses happen. They need to be reviewed because, among other things, tenure and promotion happens (or doesn't).
But, if those two things are done, I think that an alternative or supplement to paper versions makes sense.
"Would you consider spending a lot of time and effort on a book (.pdf) in your research area - for no material reward"
Well, would you consider putting your blood, sweat, tears into a project for a couple of years, for maybe $4,000? Because that is the 'payoff' for this sort of thing. In other words, no writer is doing it for the money.
I did it because I want people to know things, and I remember when I didn't have a SV salary (my father worked road maintenance, my mother cleaned toilets at hotels) and was utterly unable to access information I desperately wanted. Today I get emails from grad students and people from countries with economies that make it impossible for them to drop $150 US on a book. Why, oh why would I work this hard and then pretty much guarantee that no one but a SV engineer or tenured professor could access it? To me, that is a crazy proposition. Even if the book sales were $50K it wouldn't pay back the time invested.
Print (this kind) is dying. We can use IPython Notebook (now Jupyter notebook), or LaTeX to make perfect copy. We can be open in all ways - share the source that made the charts, share the data, and of course, share the text. You can make corrections, or run different experiments. You can fix bugs in the code. You can change the language (text or computer).
Others have mentioned academic prestige. I guess that exists, still, for now. But plenty of academics are starting to use open source, and I both hope and think that this will gain momentum. It's perverse for an academic institution to punish making information widely available. I'll admit I have no insight as to how to change that. I hope things like open access being mandated by receiving public funds will help get us there.
Anyway, so far as I know, no one writes a 300 copy book for material reward. Or, they do that once, and then the economics of the situation comes home to them.
My wife and many friends are academics. They don't exactly just type the thing up. Writing books for them is a painstaking process during which they sacrifice and put their blood, sweat, and tears into those pages.
I think this article is saying, there is a disingenuous motive on the part of the publisher. The article does not seem to imply that the authors are complicit by playing along and pumping out the academic equivalent to pulp-fiction.
When an academic puts their name on a published piece of work, it's a serious thing. To accomplish something worth attaching one's name to, it's not economically feasible for the vast majority of academics to write pdf books pro-bono. Often their already barely making a livable salary and have their plates full. To expect them to write books for free is not at all reasonable.
I agree with the other commenter that this is indeed a good outcome. Paying academics to write these niche books is paying to build the modern Library of Alexandria. Walking through a top tier university's library, one can't help but be in awe of the wealth of knowledge being accumulated. And it has value. Some today. Some down the future. But it has value.
I myself have made use of several of these esoteric books, and could tell that they'd barely, if ever, been read. I couldn't help but feel some gratitude toward the author for writing something so wonderful given it feeling like they'd written it for me and a few dozen other people. But then, others used the products I created based on that work. And so, in that sense, they wrote for those people too.
Well, both happen. There are great $200 books, and 'core dump' $200 books. I've bought both. There are publishers out there that will take any material, rubber stamp it, and publish it for very large amounts of money. Just like there are journals that will accept papers on anything - I can't tell you how many papers I start to read to realize that all they are doing is reporting on some well known result from 20+ years ago. Publish or perish, I guess.
How much does an academic get from one of these (good) books? I find it hard to believe it makes economic sense when you compare amount of labor vs money. I have an (unsigned) book contract sitting in my inbox right now - the money on offer is not a motivating factor, believe me. But, I'm an engineer, so I'm envisioning that instead of writing a book you could consult and make 10x to 100x return compared to writing. Probably not many consulting positions available in 15th century Spanish poetry. But I think I could get a better return on time working at McDonalds.
Anyway, academics are starting to write open access books. Books that no one can afford to buy, books that are not electronic and hence unsearchable, will be land fill in a few decades. We are awash in information, and this knowledge will be lost forever if we continue locking it up like this. No one is ever going to fly to, I dunno, EPFL, to wander dusty stacks for weeks to try to discover the single remaining copy of some unknown book that might benefit their research.
edit: another thread points out the existence of ILL. Fair enough. I still say any book locked on paper is dead, soon (of the type talked about in the article, defining books in the field will be known and accessible). These books get shredded after never being checked out; they aren't going to exist in 200 years to be ILL'ed, or digitized after copyright runs out. Of course exceptions will exist; I'm talking in the large.
edit2: I am not an academic, but I read academic publications every day. Access is much more difficult on this side of the ivory tower. ILL is not easy to get access to. The times I have looked into it you usually see that there are two copies of the book available, and both are checked out and won't be available for 3 months (end of semester). It's better than nothing, but it is a terrible way to distribute information.
Why do these books have to cost $150? The academics won't be getting this money, those publishers essentially won't be involved in helping improve the book, and it doesn't cost $150 nowadays to get something published, even if you want a printed version.
So if I understand correctly, we should depend on a corporation to decide where these books end up and who has access to them? It sounds like a terrible idea to me. Not all great thinkers / researchers / inventors end up being University professors.
If it doesn't end up being a book or article or in some way shape or form in writing, that the professor wants anxiously for every human in the world to read about, then chances are it wasn't worth writing about anyways.
The mistake here is that professors don't write for "every human in the world". They write specifically for a small number of people who are well versed in the research topic they work on. While it is possible that this information might be useful to others, this will usually happen as a consequence, not as the primary goal.
Yes, that is correct. But it's not to say that it's not what the professor would like. In the age of the internet (as is mentioned in the article) it seems pointless that in order for a specialist in my field to read my "magnum opus" you must fly out to some obscure state University and hope that (a) the University will allow them to check out the book being that they're not a member of that University, and (b) they think it's important enough to do so.
Perhaps it was missed, but the article was written by a professor. The point isn't that all humans in the world would be able to comprehend (or even care) about the contents of the book. The point is that they should have access to it, and the professor (who supposedly cares deeply about what he/she studies / writes about) should want all humans in the world to have easy access to it). Something that is easy to achieve, but apparently not happening.
Imagine where academics could be if, for example, people like Ramanujan had access early in their career to all of the most important ideas in their field of interest.
The more obscure an idea or field of study, the harder it's going to be to get it into the right hands.
There's no need to fly. Use Interlibrary Loan to get a copy of the book.
It's weird but true that it's often cheaper for me to make an ILL request through my local library than it is to get a copy from the publisher. The only difference is that ILL request may take a week or three to fulfill.
I know of nothing, including the power grid and Google's home page, which works 'seamlessly'. If you live in the Caribbean and there's a hurricane then it will take extra time to process your ILL request, just like your power or internet service may go down. But OCLC Resource Sharing is used in 49 countries, so while it's not perfect, it is solidly present even in 'third world countries.'
Yes, ILL works through public libraries and international public libraries. I volunteered with ILL in Santa Fe, NM and handled requests from Central America. I now live in a small city in Sweden and the closest library to me - 4 blocks away - handles ILL requests. Which I've used.
But my point is that ILL was put into place to keep people from having to fly "to some obscure state University" to read someone's "magnum opus". Adding the internet doesn't mean that older solutions to the problem no longer exist.
Fair enough, 49 countries of the almost 200 on the planet have Inter-Library loans. Seems it may be about on-par with how many countries / populations are without internet access. However, if we were to measure how much of the 49 countries' population truly had reasonable access to a library (within reasonable distance of their home) versus the total population who has access to the internet, I think we'd probably see that the internet is a far more sustainable, cheaper medium through which to transfer information.
I may be mistaken on the above, but Google and Facebook (among others) have initiated large projects to bring internet access to all humans on the planet. I have not heard of similar projects (on similar scale) to bring more libraries to the world's population. (maybe I've missed this).
I agree it's with the best of intentions that Inter Library Loans exist, but it seems quite dated in its thinking and really I see no reason to perpetuate this model. There are plenty of technologies out there these days which would allow digitization of media without consequences of rampant piracy.
"I think we'd probably see that the internet is a far more sustainable, cheaper medium through which to transfer information."
Absolutely true. Yet not that relevant. Data transfer cost isn't a major factor.
The journals in my fields are all electronic. They no longer have paper distributions. As a result, the library no longer needs to store a physical copy, and people can retrieve a copy from their office instead of spending the hour to so to find it in the library and photocopy it.
Great savings, right?
This also means that the publisher, as copyright holder, can enforce access restrictions. For example, I (as the member of the public) can use the chemistry library of a large university about an hour away to get online access to some of these journals, without paying an extra fee. However, I am not allowed to print or make copies of these articles. Once upon a time, when everything was in paper, there was no way for the publisher to make that restriction. Precisely because information transfer is cheaper, it's now possible for the publisher to have more fine-grained control.
As a result, ILL services have gotten worse. The rise of internet-based document retrieval services with limits on public (non-student/non-staff) access has meant that modern library users may need to travel more now, in order to visit a library with a given journal subscription, than 25 years ago, when an ILL request would have been possible.
> If a student in Freiburg wants to read the hard-copy version of a book from the university library in Basel, he or she can simply order it via an interlibrary loan. But if only an electronic version is available, interlibrary loans are generally not an option. The student has no choice but to climb into a train and head to Switzerland to read the book on a university computer.
This sounds like the European version of the scenario you presented, only it was solved with the 'quite dated' ILL system, and exists with e-books.
In passing you highlighted the underlying reason. The publishing companies would like it if the laws and technology were set up so that making a copy of a journal article at a library is "piracy" (I prefer the term 'copyright infringement'), unless they get paid for making the copy, and they as copyright holders should be in charge of determining what the price is. (The ILL system addressed copyright payments through RAND-like copyright clearance agreements.)
Technology which makes it easier for copyright holders to control their copyright makes it harder for people to use the same materials. Either worthy people without the funds can't get access to a paper or there is 'rampant piracy'.
I'm definitely not a fan of DRM, but mentioned it since some people are concerned about it.
I think, from the little I have read about this (with regard to the issues we've discussed here), academics in general is kind of screwed up given the power structures in place.
This might sound like a broad generalization, and perhaps counter-intuitive, but I think for academic institutions to optimize themselves, they need to be thinking about how to re-arrange the incentive structure to align with incentives that drive a professor to write books and not with incentive structure of the markets. For example I think within the realm of academics it makes total sense to move toward a "pay for the person, not the product" model.
With electronic distribution of the media, you get almost zero-cost of production and distribution (except of course for the time the author spends writing the book). This theoretically allows the industry to figure out how to cut the middle men and move those savings to the "talent" instead of finding more ways to bureaucratize the system further, eating away at the salaries of those who are producing the material in the first place. However, given the power structure my hunch is without an "(r)evolution" within those industries professors will continue to get a fraction of what they deserve.
As I am not an academic but rather an independent researcher working in industry, I have little useful to say about the academic power structure or its future.
To get back to why I joined this thread, do you accept that your scenario of having to visit a state university library in person to read someone's "magnum opus" in book form is unlikely enough that it is more fanciful than meaningful?
As you are also not an academic, I instead offer a better scenario. Many Masters and PhD dissertations are deposited in the univeristy library but otherwise unpublished, and even un-indexed. For some of those you may have to visit the library in person to see a copy or even learn that it exists.
It sounds like you are more of an expert on Inter-Library Loans than I am. If, as it sounds like you are saying, I have access to all publications from all public and private (or maybe not private) libraries in all 49 countries that offer ILL. I'm assuming, for the purposes of this discussion, that all public and private? libraries in those 49 countries participate in this ILL program. As long as I have a library card to one of said libraries, then I think it's safe to say that a publisher who publishes a fixed number of books and sells them exclusively to libraries (public or private?) which may or may not be far away from where I live, is not as big of a problem as I originally thought. Technically one could argue that I have "access" to those books.
No, you absolutely do not have access to "all publications" - for example, you cannot ask the Library of Congress to send you their copy of the Magna Carta. Some things are too bulky, expensive, or fragile to ship. Remember though that you asked about some academic's "magnum opus", which is unlikely to be restricted that way.
Remember though that your scenario concerned a state university, and those definitely are members of ILL.
"Technically one could argue that I have "access" to those books."
Yes. Though 'technically' you have access even if you have to fly to the Vatican library to see something in person. I would add the qualifier "relatively low-cost". It's costs me about $12 to get a copy of a journal article though ILL when it costs me about $35 to get it directly from the publisher. The main difference is that I need to wait a week or two. Books, oddly enough, are free.
What's your point? When $15 is a week or a month worth of wages, you're not going to buy the ebook or paperback of it either. Or are you saying that all academic books should be free? Why?
The parent comment was in regard to Inter-Library Loans. But even if loans weren't available in the country I wouldn't assume all books would be purchased by individuals. For example donations, etc. According to the article the academic who writes the books doesn't have a say as to how many are printed or where they get distributed.
And can't purchase extras if they wanted to give some away to people who they might want to collaborate with, etc.
These may sound like stories of concern to academics alone. But the problem is this: much of the time that goes into writing these books is made possible through taxpayers’ money. And who buys these books? Well, university libraries – and they, too, are paid for by taxpayers. Meanwhile, the books are not available for taxpayers to read – unless they have a university library card.
In the US, taxpayers are said to be spending $139bn a year on research, and in the UK, £4.7bn. Too much of that money is disappearing into big pockets.
What is this garbage? Why not let an interesting article about a specific problem (academic publishing scams) stand on its own? Why pour on sensationalized, over-simplified, misleading "context?"
According to to study where those numbers came from, the $139bn the federal government spends on "research" is a part of a larger pool of "funding for research" that includes non-government sources, which is like $450bn. Universities (not just the libraries) are getting about $60bn from the big pool.
In other words: the study, at least the results referenced by The Guardian article, does not say ANYTHING about the flow of money from taxpayer wallets to university libraries. Based on the evidence presented, the fraction of university library funding from taxpayer dollars could be anywhere from 0% to 100%. This is blatant dishonesty from The Guardian.
Oh and one more thing: The "good" part of the article is written by an anonymous source with no verifiable facts (no publisher names, no book names). I have no real reason to dispute its authenticity, the idea certainly seems plausible, but I can not verify any of the claims being made without basically starting my own study from scratch.
As a commenter beneath the article pointed out, it also rather clashes the Guardian's own one day seminars on "How to Write an Academic Paper and Get It Published", a snip at £249 per person...
They're just pandering to their reader demographics like most publications (have to) do, and sadly HN's demographic has shifted to overlap with that demographic the last few years. It's the circle of life, internet forum edition :) (plus this place is full of people with educational angst who try to make up for their insecurities by being very vocal about their opposition to formal education). Meh, plus que ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
This article could easily be expanded to include software developers as well as academics. I've seen several excellent developers with strong reputations contributing to the open source community get "hoodwinked" into rushing out shallow books for companies like Apress. I've seen other developers also get sucked into the game, only to see less income from the work in one year as you'd need to buy a modest used car -- after months of at least half-time effort. The market and problem for these books is a bit different than the market described in this article, but the symptoms on the writers is often the same.
Alot of publishers also do a shotgun approach to find developers to write a book for them. I've been contacted several times to act as reviewer or even write the book myself about a framework named Libgdx. All because I have a Github repo with some example code for a single feature, that's somewhat popular.
The repo is many years old, and I no longer write mobile games. So I'm not a good match as an author for such a book. Still, if I'd say yes, they would've published a shitty book. And I can't say I didn't think about it, vanity..
I'm not sure what you mean by "traditional publishing" but in many cases the books that are being written are primarily sold as ebooks, and part of the larger scam is that consumers can actually buy these books months before they are written with the promise of constant updates. I bought an Apress ebook once that was barely started when I purchased it, but that was not clear at the time. The actual finished book was nearly one year later.
But if by "traditional publishing" you include electronic publishing, then I'd agree, something is probably going to change soon. It's clear that you can get much more education in today's world in ways other than books.
Truth be told, we go to early access largely because we think it helps us make sure the book is delivering the goods, collect feedback, and hopefully improve the book as a result. We try to make it very clear how much of the book has been written - indicating what chapters have been written, and make it very clear that the book is unfinished.
Packt Publishing is worse than Apress. They basically take a subject, say Cocos2d-x, and publish a bunch of shitty books that cloud the book market with outdated information and bad code practices.
Packt and Appress ebooks are not even properly formatted for a programming subject (text alignment, code highlighting ...). Compare any Packt/Appress ebook with Pragmatic or LeanPub ebook formatting, the difference is staggering.
> This article could easily be expanded to include software developers as well as academics
companies like Apress
Your 1-paragraph HN comment has more verifiable (relevant) facts than the entire article linked. The article doesn't need to be expanded, a different one needs to be written by someone willing to be more specific.
Broadly speaking, cheap e-books from non-stellar academics are an incredible amount of data leaked for free: top peer-reviewed journals are not cheap at all and relevant conferences proceedings are often run on a pay-for-view scheme. The non-stellar academic from Windy Hill University, Nowhere, will sell a good summary of his/her field and an up to date literature review for less than $20. Bargain.
One of the thing about young people is they rarely have a sense of history. The relevant question is, how does that compare to, say, a Gen X student? We have plenty of archival evidence for that. One such is this newspaper article from 1988, titled "Students pay a high price for college textbooks" at https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=19881110&id=... . It starts off "The price of textbooks will make you cry."
The end of the first column continues "For the last 50 to 60 years students said exactly the same thing about book prices." Yes, Baby Boomers made the same complaint you just did.
The larger context is that starting in the 1980s cultural views shifted so that college should be seen as prerequisite job training, and not as a way to expand the mind, understand the world, and better oneself. Thus, colleges could justify price hikes by saying it would lead to a better jobs in the future, which could pay off the increased debt. Where Boomers could work for the summer to pay off a year of school, modern students must pay back loans for the next decade.
But that has relatively little to do with the price of textbooks. Even if the textbooks were free, it would only mean the colleges would hike the prices elsewhere to maximize profit extraction.
One quality specialized publisher is Now Publishers : http://www.nowpublishers.com/ Quality is managed by having leading academics have a say in the editorial decisions.
Their conditions are somehow better than more established ones. Authors still hold the copyright over the material, and according to the librarians at my institution, their campus and course packs are much cheaper to other publishers.
This is why, if you want to be an author publishing through the more or less conventional publishing industry, you need a first-rate agent, and a knowledge of who is a first-rate publisher.
There's a big difference between a global publisher placing your book in their professional publishing imprints versus an obscure publisher leaching a bit of money out of libraries. The first-rate publisher will also get your expensive book into their subscription programs that they market to corporate subscribers, for example.
If you have a good agent, they will steer you toward the goals you are pursuing, if you communicate those goals clearly. That's where some knowledge of which publishers have the best and/or most widely read books in your field is important.
If you want to get your book into the more-widely sold trade paperback format, you need to tune your proposal to that goal. Most publishers require you to do some competitive analysis in your proposal. That's going to be important guidance for where your book ends up.
Reminds me of Business Secrets of the Pharaohs [0]. But does anyone actually enter in to this process without understanding what it is? Looks like is is a widely known practice [1].
Editor: Nothing's happening and you guys are behind on ad impressions. Anyone have content ideas?
"Freelance" Journalist: Oh! I could do a creative writing prompt as an "Anonymous Academic," sexing up the ordinary academic publishing world with an expose. Bitter college kids will eat that up on social media.
And students are being hoodwinked into buying them. The books also often include minutiae which change from edition to edition, so you have to get the nth edition in order to take your class - because in physics, for instance, there are Q&A in the books which differ between editions.
The main book we had to get was written by two of the lecturers, and was £300. It was so half-assedly bound that you had to cut the pages open.
Did you complain to the university? Which university? Sounds like a low grade institution to me. When I studied physics at Exeter in the mid 70s there was a lively trade in second hand books and I don't think that any of the books specified that they had to be the absolutely latest edition. Nor did the faculty write a book and demand that we bought it; I think that might have caused a lot of trouble then but students now seem to be more docile than we were. We mostly didn't do exercises from textbooks, we had tutors who set work so it didn't matter which edition you used so long as the contents were correct.
Possibly a negative amount - some of these publishers do, in essence, a classic "who's who"/vanity publishing scam where the profit comes from the author paying for a bunch of expensive copies, and they usually won't even be sold to anyone else.
I wonder how much of this is simply a function of the massive overpopulation of graduate programs and the growing need to fill out CVs with publications? I know that this has been happening for years in the form of obscure journals that no one reads or cares about.
One of the best emails I've received in a while was from the UVA alumni association letting me know that I would retain library access, including access to JSTOR, because there is no way I could afford to outright purchase everything I want to read.
They're like software: really cheap at the margin to make the 100,000th copy, really expensive to make the first one. Textbooks are pricey and Harry Potter is not because textbooks sell hundreds of copies and Harry Potter sells hundreds of millions. (With a wee bit of portfolio theory going on where HP also has to pay for advance checks written to all the talented single mothers on welfare who write books in obscurity but who are not J.K. Rowling and do not become billionaires because their books have more typical outcomes and sell ~X00 copies worldwide.)
Why didn't the author name the publisher? So librarians, unfamiliar with esoteric fields can put a black mark next to that publisher's name and only buy from that publisher if requested or approved by an academic in that field. Surely the reputation damage that should be inflicted would stop such practises iftheyexist. But we have a claim with no evidence at this point.
I agree, the original article doesn't hold up well under scrutiny. Anonymous source and no verifiable, relevant facts-- even facts that should be easy to obtain.
Perhaps the author of an editorial in a British newspaper is aware of the draconian libel laws in the UK, and doesn't want to name names to avoid a likely lawsuit?
This is exactly the result the market should hope for: a profitable method which gets academics to write down very-incredibly-niche ideas and then put copies of them exactly where someone would expect to find very-incredibly-niche ideas. The alternative to these $150 books is not $7.50 books. It is "no book." They do not meaningfully trade off with equally-in-depth blog posts, because academics are not scored on, and hence do not as a matter of practice actually sit down and write, book-length blog posts.