People also write books by hand, and with a typewriter. (And as seanmcdirmid pointed out, 1980s, not 1960s; and it's not a terminal but a personal computer.) T

People also write books by hand, and with a typewriter. (And as seanmcdirmid pointed out, 1980s, not 1960s; and it's not a terminal but a personal computer.) The thing is, book publishers have people who will re-typeset a manuscript. Especially if written by a best selling author whose next books will sell in the millions. By comparison, the academic press shifts most of that work on the authors. Academic authors don't get paid to write content and sometimes have to pay, don't get paid for typesetting, don't get paid for peer reviews, etc. (And Elsevier, one of the big academic presses, had a profit margin of 36% in 2010.) If your heart wants to get published in an academic journal, then you may end up using a different tool than if your heart wants to publish on the web, or wants to publish a best-selling novel. By analogy, if my heart is set on doing Python programming, I won't be doing much microcontroller work. If my heart is set on optimizing the performance of dense linear solvers, then I likely won't do it in Python.