Hacker News Reader

Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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..

To me this is a sign that the end of traditional publishing is very near. They milk the last drops from a dying field ?

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.

for me traditional publishing is (printed) books, magazines, newspapers, CDs & DVDs at most..

Manning Publications editor here.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com