Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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'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.
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."
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.
(Edit: language)
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.
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'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).
Which publishers? If they are scams they should be exposed.
The linked article included no verifiable details.
This is not beach reading, it is an input to an industrial process.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
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.
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.
And can't purchase extras if they wanted to give some away to people who they might want to collaborate with, etc.
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.
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.
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.
See http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/how-copyright-... for "The Digital Paradox: How Copyright Laws Keep E-Books Locked Up." Quoting from it:
> 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 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.
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.
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.
No, not all public and private libraries are members of the OCLC. A search of http://www.oclc.org/contacts/libraries.en.html gives 15K OCLC members and 63K participating libraries around the world. The library at the National Museum of Mysteries (see http://web.randi.org/swift/paranormal-themed-festivals-bring... ) is not listed as one of them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
[0] http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/ [1] I certainly do - I dislike Anton and Rorres
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.
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.
I'm cofounder of Leanpub, and some of our bestselling books (https://leanpub.com/bookstore/earnings_in_last_7_days/all/al...) are academic books about data science written by professors. This includes our #1 book this week (https://leanpub.com/artofdatascience).
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...
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".
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.
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 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...
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.
[1]: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/159655/commutative-diagram...
Those aren't academic books, those are introductory text books.
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.
And always will. My favorite example: http://www.npr.org/2012/04/16/150723840/for-japanese-linguis... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8275064).
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.
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf14307
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.
Well done pointing this out. This supposed academic, is doing palpable damage to his/her own industry.
This is the kind of article we can expect to be quoted by the right-wing crazies who want to shut down all universities.
Well, it is The Guardian...
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..
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 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.
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.
We are made to buy extremely expensive books and waste time reading crap books all the time.
The best books in my field were written randomly over the last 300 years.
I think ALL information should be free in the digital age. its the maximum rate of efficiency.
There are 6 billion people in the world without a proper high class uni education like myself.
How is it that we are okay supplying free weapons to poor people but go to great deal to restrict the supply of information ?
Aaron Swartz - Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...
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.
I hope that was a rhetorical question.
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.
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.
http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/09/05/the-guardian-been-b...
[0] http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/entertainment/articles/2012-12/...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_open_access_publishi...
"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.
Editor: Guess that works. Run it!
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.
Most tutors set work outside of books, but there were definitely a few who were rinsing students for all it was worth.
Edit: seems they've gone further down the textbook route - here's their justification on the matter - https://www.dur.ac.uk/physics/students/textbooks/
"So why don’t academics simply stay away from the greedy publishers? The only answer I can think of is vanity."
Or that the publishers are misrepresenting how the books might sell.