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Comment by tapia | Hacker News Reader

This is really an issue that should not exist. I have also bought textbooks only to be immediately disappointed by the fact that you have to use a specific app (like the adobe DRM thing... or just try to get your money back). Then you have to start figuring out how to remove the DRM and lose time with that. Sometimes the quality of the book is also pretty bad, e.g. they don't even include a digital table of contents, which should be essential in a digital copy of any book (this has happened to me with textbooks from Springer). In my case, this has lead to actually buying less textbooks and just pirate the books instead. I don't have the time to deal with all this customer-unfriendly behavior.

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One of my textbooks came with a digital copy. I would sometimes just use that on my iPad instead of lugging in the physical book to campus. I remember racking my brain all day on a problem that asked you to prove some result, wondering how the hell that was true only to get home and realize the digital version flipped the inequality...

As a maths teacher who also have written a textbook, I have seen a drastic increase in errors in books compared to 5-10 years ago. I don't know why, maybe the scheduler is tighter or proofreading is now too expensive.

I've authored book chapters with Springer. I've used their LaTeX class and produced some nice looking chapters (imho).

They get "typeset" by SPI in Chennai by a non maths speaker, non-native English speaker and come back with errors in both the equations and words and author queries like "equation missing but we follow tex".

One professional mathematican I know in a suitably obscure area of number theory has started her own journal to get around it all. I'm in both the physics and medicine camps and have to put up with this bullshit. It's awful.

The last springer book I've had is so poorly written that there is absolutely no way it was proofread. It is not just one mistake here or there. It looks like a quick draft with incomplete sentences, repetitions all over. Looks like those "cheap" packt books.

Looks like someone sent "fundamentals_of_math-e4-v2-final-finalv3-final.docx" to the printer instead of "fundamentals_of_math-e4-v2-final-finalv3-final-final.docx"

I published a book with degruyter and there is no proofreading at all. No support to get e.g. the colours right for printing. They only give you some example books, a rough latex template and minor advice on content and audience. Once it is published they will ask you if you want to prepare a revised version. It was OK because e.g. my students get a free ebook version anyways via the university subscription and I guess it is ok for the rest to pay the overpriced but well printed book.

If your students get it for free why not make it open access on wikibooks or something like that? The only reason people in academia were publishing the books as books was for resume stuffing but that was a different domain.

Actually resume stuffing was the major reason (not to get a job but rather for positioning oneself). I wrote it in my free time actually (my income on the book is about a 10th of the time put into it). That it is free to the students is just a nice side effect. The target audience is decision makers in smaller companies. You do not reach them via wikibooks. I guess I would have never written it as open access, because in this case I would have left it to others.

I would like to see a peer review/editing community for wikibooks btw, that actually would lead to better quality of books. distill.pub eg IMHO is great.

From what I heard, it’s because Springer et al. hired editors in India to cut costs…

Could have been a Dantzig moment![0]

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-unsolvable-math-proble...

I have a $70 ebook (Amazon Kindle) of an academic work (not a textbook) and it is practically unusable. So many problems compared to the physical book. Never again.

I've found that a ton of older books published as ebooks were clearly just OCR'd and then not thoroughly edited. Definitely frustrating.

Handling complex material has never been a priority for the Kindle. To be fair, more recent iterations have improved support for things like tables and MathMl, but it’s still a work in progress.

With my adhd I learn programming drastically better on physical books. Stupid I know, but it helps drastically to see it on paper.

Sadly it’s either crazy expensive, or not even an option to get paper for newer frameworks

> Stupid I know, but it helps drastically to see it on paper.

Not stupid at all. Myself, and every single colleague of mine that I know (pure mathematicians) have to print every non-trivial document that we really want to study deeply.

I'm reminded of 'edw519, and his habit of printing out source code listings to work on without losing focus. See e.g. http://static.v25media.com/edw519_mod.html#chapter_49, and then CTRL+F for "print" from there.

I used to do this all the time in my early career. Stopped at some point.

Probably when I stopped working on really hard things and started working on complicated things that touch tons of files.

Going to try this again. It was really helpful

The biggest problem I have with it for textbooks is just how slow the fucking thing is to scroll between pages. Which is a key operation for a reference material.

I spent $100 on a textbook on kindle, then just pirated the PDF for this reason.

These are pretty poor excuses to cope with piracy

I think that the poor excuses are in the other side. Adding DRM to files to actively preventing the user to choose in which devices he/she wants to read the file and for how long the content will be available goes against the whole concept of "buying" a book. When I buy a book I expect to be able to open it in ten years in whatever device I'm using, running any OS that I want. That's why we have standard formats. And I also expect that the quality of a book for which I payed 50-90€ for (because that is normally the price range) to have a good quality and at least a table of contents. A few occasions I had to manually add table of contents for books that otherwise would have been unusable to me.

"buying a book". You're not, though. Nor a film/movie. It is, at least in the US, treated as something along the lines of a temporary contract to view. And so... DRM is used to as a tool of enforcement of the contract term's expiration.

Hence piracy is the better option.

Piracy is the moral option.

Yeah, that's the whole problem.

If legal options aren’t useable, the black market will fill the void. Once this is fixed, the dynamic swings back (like how torrenting became less popular since streaming services) You might find it immoral, but 99% of the world disagrees with you (e.g. ubiquity of illegal drug use worldwide)

Maybe my perception is off, but it seemed to me that torrenting really dropped off a cliff when Netflix was dominant, and had basically everything available on it.

Then, when the streaming service market blew up because the content owners wanted to make more money by only offering their content on their own service (Disney+, CBS all access, etc.), torrenting went back up because it was no longer inexpensive for a streaming subscription, since you needed a dozen of them to cover everything you wanted to see (with usually only one show on one service that you care about).

Yeah definitely, the pendulum swings based on consumer satisfaction. Hopefully streaming can be federated in some way and we can get past this phase.

I kinda doubt it: doing so would decrease profits, because you wouldn't, for instance, be able to pay a tiny amount to just watch one show on Disney+ instead of having to buy a full subscription.

Instead, it's going to be like cable TV and landline telephone service: something new will come along to attract people's attention, and they'll just keep pissing customers off, and as more and more leave, the service will get worse and worse, and the prices higher and higher, to take advantage of the suckers who refuse to leave, until the whole thing finally implodes.

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