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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 a

by oneJob 11y ago

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.

RogerL 11y ago
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.

by oneJob 11y ago

RogerL 11y ago

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.