> 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.
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.
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 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.