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Comment by guidovranken | Hacker News Reader

The article makes many lofty claims about how knowledge must be free, but how can books continue to be put out if you disincentivize the authors? What's in it for them? Had I been an expert on a niche technical or academic subject in the eighties or nineties I might have published a book on it. These days, certainly not.

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I am an academic, with about 25 scholarly publications, depending on how you count them (see http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/dino/pubs/ for a list and for links to download them). I am here to tell you that we DO NOT GET PAID for writing papers (which, much more than books, are the primary medium of research in the sciences). Of the 25 listed papers, I got paid something for one of them, which was not really research but activism -- and I was paid by the acdvocacy group, not by a publisher. For some of the papers on the list, _I_ paid the _publisher_: this is not unusual.

There is literally no downside for an academic author to have his or or her work made freely available to the world: only the considerable upside of greatly increased visibility and influence -- which is the true currency of academia.

As another academic author who works in vastly different field, I can confirm this is true in all disciplines I have had the opportunity to discuss with colleagues. It is common to pay a thousand and not uncommon to pay a few thousand to get something published, and the most that can be made from an academic book is in the same range. If I were to write for profit, it would be by writing a popularized version of a trending topic with far less academic value than a typical publication.

You do get paid for books, however. So you’re just so slightly missing the point.

Academics may get paid an advance for textbooks, some of which will earn out their advance, an even smaller portion of which will go to a second edition, an even smaller portion of which will make their author some serious money.

For the overwhelming majority of books published by academics that are not textbooks fewer than 5,000 will ever be printed and that’s being really generous. They’re academic books, written for academic readers and the only people who make any money on them are the publishers.

Which one of your papers was written for the advocacy group?

I have quite a few friends who have written technical books, universally they say that the money isn't worth the huge amount of time it takes. So you either do it for the prestige, or because you want to share your knowledge.

There's something to be said about low five figures being meaningfully different from zero, but we already have plenty of people sharing knowledge for free, so I'm still pretty convinced this doesn't matter.

IMO books need to become more collaborative affairs, rather than spewing out ever more of them. We already have a lot of books that overlap in completely unclear ways, and what we actually need is a way to integrate this knowledge.

Have any of your friends self-published? That seems to be the way of at least possibly making some real money off of publishing a technical book, particularly if you have some added value content you can sell with it as a more expensive package, like a video course, extensive sample code or cheat sheets.

No. Most of them have had good things to say about their editors too. And again, they are not doing with a profit motive in mind, and self-publishing can conflict with other goals, e.g. prestige.

Publishers also help your book stand out from the Pakt hordes. Not that all of Pakt is bad, but a lot of people are unwilling to even look at books from there.

Most writing pays very little or nothing. The Stephen Kings and JK Rowlings of the world are very much the exception, not the rule.

Money is not the only reason to do something. I'm a freelance writer and blogger. I would love to be financially better off than I am, but the reality is life is much more complicated than just what pays money and what doesn't.

Even when you do make money at something, there are things that you have to do that aren't per se monetized, yet are necessary parts of the process. If you try to excise them in the name of profit, it can kill the goose that is laying the golden eggs.

Just to add, JK Rowling said that she wrote it in the hope that one day one of her kids would find it in a thrift shop and they’d be amazed to see their mum’s name on the cover.

She wasn’t expecting to be this successful either.

Yeah. She wrote it while she was in sort of double limitation - unable to pay for baby daycare having only money from some social program and unable to find a job because lack of daycare. She was however able to write while caring about baby so she did it.

As an author of a book on a niche technical subject, the profit motive was not actually in the revenue from book sales, but rather the prestige associated with being the author of a book on something.

I’m currently writing a book, and I’ll be very impressed and happy if I get as much as $2000 for it.

This was not financially “smart” given how long I spent on it (it’s around 400 pages), but even if I was doing this for the money rather than the need to tell the story, my main financial risk isn’t piracy — its all the other highly competent writers writing better books. In fact, my desire to make it the best it can be is why it’s taking me so long…

Many University presses make money by selling hard bound copies to academic libraries. When some of these books become popular, paperback copies are sold. Usually, a hard bound copies are 3 to 4 times more expensive than paperbacks. Even when academic libraries acquire a paperback copy, they send these books for binding to preserve them for decades, if not centuries.

Academics want their books to be published by 'reputed' publishers, so that these books can be accessible in libraries, unless a professor requests his library to acquire it.

Now we have so many fiefdoms online: all Oxford University Press publications are available on oxfordscholarship.com. Every major publisher has its own online access. It is like online movie catalogues held by different companies. And no one has access to all of them. This is why even academics go and search on scihub and libgen sites for books, instead of going through their libraries.

Academics want their works to be known to fellow academics and the public as well. That's the incentive, not royalty.

Book publishers usually give the author a cut of the sales, academic publishers usually don’t pay the authors anything.

There are far more consumers of technical writings due to the accessibility today. Had you been in the 90's you most likely would never afford to publish on the scale possible with online sales today.

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