Comment by cup-of-tea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cup-of-tea | Hacker News Reader

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My experience in science has been the same. I used to look at high quality publications and made it a goal of mine to have my own. Recently I delivered a number of high-quality figures in a vector format for use in a publication. I made especially sure that the text and line widths were appropriate for the document. When I saw the final version of the paper I was quite upset. Not only was the main text riddled with typos and inconsistencies (thanks to having multiple authors), the figures were rendered at low resolution in both print and PDF versions. I mean literally visible pixels on a printed page. So my work was distributed in a lower quality than my own PhD thesis.

But the reason we still use these publishers is simple and we all know it. Many people are happy to complain about publishers but nobody is happy to take the hit on their own CV. You shouldn't use publishers for the above reasons, but did you see my latest Impact Factor XX paper in Journal You Have Heard Of?

Also sad is that recent republication of classic book titles and too much publication of new niche works is done print-on-demand, with poor quality paper, poor printing, and very flimsy binding. If I’m going to spend $100 for a new book, I want something that was printed on a real press, with real binding.

I tried buying a few reissued historical mathematics books published by Chelsea (now owned by the AMS) and I could have gotten a better output by taking the Internet Archive’s scan to my local copy shop. I quickly returned them and looked online for a used original.

It makes me also not want to buy recent editions of e.g. Springer mathematics books: the technical content may be great, but the binding falls off and the figures all look like crap. It’s a hard choice whether to buy a used 15 year old copy with various technical errors sprinkled throughout, or a poorly made recent edition with corrections and an extra chapter or two.

So many new books on Amazon are bad quality reprints.

Certain subjects depend on quality, clear illustrations.

I just assumed a new book meant quality of the original, but I was wrong.

Years ago, when I was learning watch repair, I bought a new copy of The Watch Repairer's Manual, by Henry Fried. Published by the American Watchmaker's Press. It wasen't cheap then either.

As I was reading it, the diagrams seemed fuzzy. I thought it was just me though. I'm a first edition collector, and have a huge library. You would think I would have spotted a bad printing run.

Well, I happened to buy the same book off eBay, but was published in 1973. The pages, and illustrations were crisp, and clear.

I learned my lesson though. It's a clever way to sell a new book. My lesson was don't trust new book anywhere. Used, old print is fine by me.

New is not better when it comes to certain books. In the back of my mind, I wondered how anyone could offer a new copy of an obscure book. Well, it's by inferior printing.

There's a market for quality reprints of certain books. We like to think we made so much progress, but not when it comes to printing books. We have regressed. Pick up any magazine from the 40's through the 70's, and you will notice the quality difference. I'm not saying we need to go back to Linotype printing. Im just saying we have regressed in printing.

(My grandfather was a completely color blind printer. He went his whole career never telling anyone. He was laser focused on the print quality, or "tack sharp" as he used to say. Yes--completely color blind. He would ask his coworkers, customers if the colors looked right. He would then make color adjustments. His best advice to me was moderation in everything. This was coming from a 3 pack/day smoker, eight drink minimum, with a 1/2 hose feeding his lower extremities due to plaque. He lived until 80. Crazy?)

Literally why TeX exists. Donald Knuth couldn't tolerate the poor quality of digital typesetting.

that's not entirely correct. when linotype was dumped phototypesetting was introduced. and it seems it was not possible to reintroduce the typesetting of the linotype age. DEK wanted to have a digital typesetter reproducing the same quality of linotype. if the typesetting of that time and if it was digital at all was poor quality is unbeknownst to me

> Certain subjects depend on quality, clear illustrations... the diagrams seemed fuzzy. I thought it was just me though. I'm a first edition collector, and have a huge library.

This is exactly the kind if situation where digital hi-res screens and zoomable vector diagrams as presentation formats are immensely superior to paper print. You're a collector and hence holding on to print editions because of nostalgia. We're however hobbled from evolving high quality modern documentation by being tired to "printability" like pdfs and Tex

The interface for reading on screens sucks. The hardware (e.g. iPads) is getting there but the software is still miserable.

Hard to browse, bookmark, annotate (either in place or separately), cross-reference, cut and paste (as with scissors). Doesn’t help that most books are not available in a carefully crafted digital-native format.

The people I know with the most effective research habits, even ones who get most of their material online, still make great use of note cards, white boards, marked-up printouts, and the like.

For now paper is definitely preferable for reading anything but pulp novels, newspapers, and ongoing discussions. But I can imagine that changing if some people put in work on the software side in the next couple decades. Biggest pain point at the moment is probably authoring tools.

If every basic textbook was filled with interactive (programmable?) diagrams, computer simulations, extra related media, links between text and video lectures, a wider variety of practice problems at varying difficulty with full listings of hints and solutions, in depth technical annotations and bibliographic links to primary sources (viewable in place) for every chapter, etc., learning from textbooks could be made much more reader-centered, with books becoming less a serial prose format and more like a tree/graph. But all that stuff takes massive amounts of work, and would require some kind of collective funding by a group laser-focused on the real-world effectiveness and quality of the output, rather than political bullshit or rent-seeking, as most current curriculum designers and textbook publishers are. Teams of volunteers like Wikipedia aren’t really able (at least that I’ve seen) to make a novice-friendly but still accurate explanation or a coherent narrative for a whole large subject.

So you want qualified expert content producers working on producing top quality learning and educational material? Well our great market tells us this is only possible at Pixar or HBO or Weta in the service of fantasy and nothing else. Khan Academy and Wikipedia type models are what is left to serve everything else.

Additional data point: affiliate-compensated reviews of high value consumer items, e.g. http://wirecutter.com (now owned by NY Times) and http://dpreview.com (digital cameras). These are not cross-media, but require expensive research and good summaries.

Why should it take decades? I think you're conflating the UI issues with pedagogy and teaching-oriented publishing. GPs point seems to be that we already have the tools we need to start webifying the academic literature. There's no technical reason that we're stuck reading two-column PDF documents with no internal or external links.

Your other points I think are important, but really more related to teaching materials and textbooks than journal articles. Projects like nanohub are doing interesting work in this area imo.

Usable implementations shouldn’t take decades if people put the research and development work in, though the basic UI research probably needs at least 8–10 years of some top-class people thinking hard about it. I’m just speculating that it might happen within a few decades that that work gets done, but alternatively it might not and paper might remain superior.

> So many new books on Amazon are bad quality reprints.

Is it possible that what you'd bought was a counterfeit? Amazon apparently has a problem with knock-offs being commingled with their publisher-supplied stock. Here's the founder of No Starch Press tweeting about Amazon selling counterfeit copies of Python For Kids. The diagrams were fuzzy & pixelated (and black and white), and the paper quality was significantly inferior:

https://twitter.com/billpollock/status/844030960333152256

There was an HN discussion about it 6 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924546

> Also sad is that recent republication of classic book titles and too much publication of new niche works is done print-on-demand, with poor quality paper, poor printing, and very flimsy binding. If I’m going to spend $100 for a new book, I want something that was printed on a real press, with real binding.

Producer prices for printing have long been increasing much quicker than general inflation for a long time, so either lower quality or higher prices for the end product is a natural consequence.

Any sources on this? What is driving costs?

Can you clarify? There are sites with print-your-own support and produce good binding on quality paper at good prices. Why cannot commercial publishers do this?

Which sites offer this? Provide examples.

There are several, easily found by googling "self publishing": https://tragicbooks.com/2017/01/02/my-experience-self-publis...

This link contains a sort-of market analysis.

Is it too much to ask to name actual services that meet the description given? That is:

> print-your-own support and produce good binding on quality paper at good prices

I know it's a bit subjective, but I want to know, which services do that?

Last I saw was made on Lulu (letter size, hard cover). I wasn't the one paying for it, so not sure how much it was; I am sure they have pricing on the web.

They don't provide “good prices” compared to traditional printing for any kind of volume, at best they provide good prices compared to common retail prices for traditionally printed work, but a publisher using them still has to amortize fixed non-printing costs across the print run, they can't just sell for the printing costs and even break even.

Those kind of services do make very small print runs possible at lower prices than would be the case for traditional printing at the same time (because they have lower fixed and higher per-unit costs than traditional printing), but they don't represent a reduction in overall printing costs.

And don't forget all the really nasty political things going on in the backstage of big 3 journals (Nature, Science & Cell). Big PIs often reach agreements with editors before writing their papers.

Say what? Could you elaborate?

Citations?

Well I can't cite anything, I'm just talking about my experience and things I've seen first hand many many times.

If you're a PI on a big project or heading a big group, it's routine business to meet journal editors, invite them to your lab and reach publication agreements before writing your paper.

Obviously the paper will still go to review. But even that is already a big hurdle you have bypassed. In the big 3 journals, it's equally tough to get to review than to pass reviews once there. Plus, with direct contact to the editor, it's easier to get your paper reviewed by friendlier peers and/or influence ultimate editorial decisions.

That would be scandalous headline news if true.

It's standard in human genetics, at least in the UK. The editors of Nature have a close relationship with influential PIs and their labs, are present at social events / parties, and the general direction and appropriateness/desirability of papers are certainly discussed with the editors early in the process. These are projects with large budgets that span several years. Of course, there is still peer review, and it is still rigorous.

I can't speak for the UK, but in the government-managed science programs of other countries this behavior would be landing people in prison, standard practice or not.

What makes it illegal? I mean, what specific law would make it so? Where exactly?

I've also seen this happen, where an article was designed in pre-consultation with a journal editor in my field. We submitted (what I felt was) a dubious paper initially. Reviews were very harsh, but the paper was not rejected. I was amazed we had four months to revise and resub. It was eventually published. I was an early grad student at the time, so I didn't know that this was unusual.

This is true in my experience as well - most papers to these vanity journals are rejected without review by the editor ("desk reject"), and a prior relationship between a PI and the editor basically guarantees you will sail past that stage.

I guess anything is possible but I doubt that those journals, who depend so much on their perception of quality would so easily compromise it. If this is confirmed it would be a business disaster for them.

What to me would sound less unlikely (and I am totally on the outside of all of this), if PIs take into account editor's interests and preferences -- that is, if you know that editor is interested in topic A (say, oxygen on exoplanets) you might lean in that direction with the paper you hope to publish there (e.g., in abstract / intro / conclusion stress how your research supports existence or lack thereof of oxygen). Also not impossible to know if an issue is dedicated to a specific grand theme, so articles on that have a significantly higher acceptance chance.

Whether this is 100% kosher or not can be debated, but this is far, far off from agreements that a journal will publish whatever a specific researcher writes.

By nature (ahem), editors of these journals are responsible for what goes in their pages. Decisions of what to run have some motive - you can call them "political," or "profit-driven." But this has always been there. If an editor thinks your research isn't in the cutting edge, it won't get published. There used to be an override mechanism (in PNAS, Academy members could recommend others' papers for review).

If you need anecdotal examples, I'm sure we can provide some :)

Hmm sounds similar to the prisoner's dilemma problem/tragedy of the commons.

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