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Get a Packt Pub book a day for free

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52 pointsDraconar38 comments

My experience as a reviewer for a Packt book: I gave them feedback about specific technical issues, large pieces which I felt were missing and some general feedback about how the text was full of spelling mistakes and general lack of quality.

I didn't hear much back from the coordinator and/or author and a few months later I received a free copy of the book. It was hardly any different from the draft I reviewed.

I'm generally unimpressed with Packt. Bill Pollock said (so consider the source) that Packt is not really a publisher, but just a printer. They don't really have any (copy)editors. They make everyone else do the work and pay them with complimentary copies of their (in my opinion) low-quality books.

I almost became an author (of a video series) for them. I signed a contract and produced a couple of chapters. I found they had pretty reasonable copy editors, at least the one I worked with was helpful and thorough.

My main problem, and the reason I didn't finish the series was their advance was very low and the royalty rate was too. After looking round it seemed the rate was probably reasonable for authors in other fields, but very bad compared to what I would earn actually programming. Plus they absolutely refused to give me any indication of how many sales I could expect. I couldn't justify spending the time to complete the series vs regular contracting. I think this low remuneration affects the quality of the authors they are able to attract, so you're right in that part.

The advance they offered me was less than a quarter of the advance I've seen quoted for other specialised tech books, and about a tenth of what an author would expect for a best-selling mainstream consumer-oriented title.

They also spam people on mailing lists looking for authors. (Not spam the mailing lists - harvest addresses and contact people more or less at random.)

>I think this low remuneration affects the quality of the authors they are able to attract, so you're right in that part.

From what I've seen, not all the books are terrible. ;)

But they're certainly not in the same league as No Starch, or most of the self-pubbed titles on LeanPub.

I wrote a book for Packt and made less than $1000 from it, two years later. However, it is something to put on your resume (if you want to) and I managed to use it to leverage a book deal for a more reputable publisher later on. So it can be useful if you think you might want to write books in the future. However, yeah, the money isn't going to be worth your time by a long shot.

I did a video for them, and got a book deal with another publisher off the back of it.

I actually learned a lot through doing the video, and the guidance I got was pretty good over the technical aspects of putting a video together. The later script editing and review stage was dismal, though. I got the feeling the less experienced editors I worked with later were overworked.

They're the print equivalent of shovelware.

I've been contacted by them before and declined because I don't want to be associated with their brand, and I've proofread a friend's book that was published through them because he didn't trust their actual editors. They do have a process that's more than just "submit anything and we'll print it", but they're not very good at what they do (books are submitted in MS Word format!?).

I think they're mostly just riding the monetary coattails of fad tech topics, they don't care if their publishings are worthless because they just print so much volume that no single book will ever be popular enough that a bad one will gain much notice, and their topics are generally so niche or topic-of-the-month oriented that there will never be enough readers for an individual book to throw much of a fit over quality problems.

Other than O'Reilly, I think most publishers still insist on MSWord for submissions.

The times I've worked with them, No Starch was quite happy with LibreOffice, if that's any better.

O'Reilly's insistence on making everyone use git (including non-programmers) seems a bit nuts to me.

Having worked on the editorial/production side in a couple of publishing ventures, being able to insist on a git-based workflow would have been a godsend. Given O'Reilly's reputation and prominence, they can get away with requiring more from their authors. If they have any high-profile authors that refuse to use git, I'm sure that they could assign an assistant to manually translate between git and the author's preferred workflow.

Not just the authors. The editors, the designers, the people who do layout, and people who just never wrote a single line of code or typed a single command into a Unix shell in their life... all of them use git, and last I heard, they all have to learn how to use the CLI version of git.

It's nuts. Git is hard enough to learn for people who know the internals of how computers work. Making people who would rather be drawing artwork learn how to use git seems really crazy to me. Hearing the coping stories from non-technical people using git is very sad.

I agree that git is an awfully complex tool for non-technical users to understand. However, the concept of version control is incredibly powerful—anyone who utilizes it has a huge advantage in productivity. Perhaps O'Reilly would be better off providing a more simplified system (perhaps even a simple GUI on top of git, offering a small subset of functionality), but I can see why they insist on a VCS-based workflow.

Git with a Gui (Sourcetree, Github etc.) is a pretty straight forward exercise.

I've seen designers use version control with things like: filename.FINALE.jpg filename.Last Finale.jpg filename.Approved Finale.jpg etc.

Certainly its worth the half hour getting your head around the basics of SourceTree than that...

> Git with a Gui (Sourcetree, Github etc.) is a pretty straight forward exercise.

I don't know anything about the situation myself, but jordigh (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9694685) said:

> last I heard, they all have to learn how to use the CLI version of git

(emphasis mine).

They have some nice tools now that work through git, although you never have to actually interact with git at any point during the writing process, unless you want to. Git just runs on the back end.

I guess things have improved. The stories I heard were about a contract-based indexer having to use CLI git.

I can also back this up from experience reviewing a Packt book. By the end of the process I regretted starting after quickly realising the quality was so low.

Similar experience here: got a draft that was so far off the mark, I declined the opportunity to review. In general their game seems to be quantity over quality.

I am actually the author of an as-yet-unpublished book by Packt and have a few things to say about their publishing process. Essentially the quality of the book boils down to the author, with very little in the way of copy-editing or technical reviewing. The quality I would assume varies wildly from book to book, depending on how much time the author was willing to put into it.

I did technical reviewing for one of their books. Did they offer you a technical reviewer? Maybe they look for one but if they can't find one, they go ahead and publish whatever crap they have anyway.

What value are they contributing in the publishing process, then? Anything other than typesetting and marketing?

Distribution! They have an audience, and they know if they publish x books per week, they will make y $$$'s.

But that is a fair question for an author to ask. If you already have an audience, then you would seriously look at what value they bring.

That's a good question -- I mean, they will run through the code and make sure it compiles or runs as specified. They will find and provide you with technical recruiters from the community (with promises of their name appearing in the list of technical reviewers). But Packt themselves do not add anything as far as I can tell besides printing and publicizing.

I also was a reviewer on a Packt book. The coordinator was sometimes a bit uncoordinated but I felt the book that came out was excellent (D Cookbook). This is probably more due to the author than anything though.

Browsing their books while choosing my free book made me realize they definitely have very open floodgates when it comes to publishing. I don't really consider flooding the market with books a problem though because I read books based on recommendation. If only a few gems come out as a result of their shotgun approach to publishing I think we are still all better off for it.

Packt once approached me to write a book about LaTeX. They would only accept the manuscript in MS Word.

Needless to say negotiations didn't get very far.

To be honest that wasn't necessarily a red-line, but it was clear that their typesetting was fairly basic (their books at the time did look like Word docs - I've not looked at one in print for a while so I can't comment on current standards) and their ability to provide information about royalties was opaque to say the least. So my confidence wasn't with them.

But fair play to Packt, in a short space of time they've created a large collection of titles, particularly in niche areas which O'Reilly wouldn't touch. It's great that there is a publisher willing to invest in the IT textbook sector. I'm just hoping that things have improved as they've grown.

Pretty cool. There are some great Packt books (I liked Haviv's MEAN Web Development when trying out the stack), but am I wrong in thinking the signal-to-noise ratio is kinda bad? It reminds me a lot of Udemy (seems like anyone can publish).

The quality varies greatly from one book to the next, more so than with other tech publishers in my opinion.

Many of their books, as far as I can tell, are simply reprints of a framework's API documentation.

Interesting counterpoint to this is jQuery. Their jQuery book came out very early in the game and was authored by people very much involved in the project. Some of the jQuery API docs are actually based on the book.

The Guava book, and the High Performance Postges book was pretty good.

Additionally, something with Packt that you have to watch out for: Some of their titles conflict with each other. I.e. Along with the High Performance Postgres book, theres another book called Managing Postgresql, its not so great ircc.

I've just published with Packt and the experience was better than the previous times I've worked with them. The reviewers they had on board spotted lots of issues - both with wording and the technical aspects - and the project coordinator was quick to respond.

My biggest issue with them is that their tooling is poor, from using MS Word templates to having no version control process for documents and code.

I agree with other posters that the quality of the book will strongly depend on the writer.

I've published two books through them. The first book was an amazing experience. The second was a horrible experience with a high rate of turnover from my "editors" and a total lack of communication.

I'm happy with the quality of my books, and I feel it was a great opportunity, but my next book I will goto a better publisher or self publish.

Also, my books are about gaming on the Raspberry Pi, which I feel is a very niche topic.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1784399337

My friend and I were frequently harassed over writting a book on the Raspberry pi. I'm a dev and hes an it automation person. We both have not had experience with the device.

Packt was a notorious spammer of my mailing lists in the past, asking literally everyone (so it seemed) if they wanted to write a book, and then after producing one, did it again on another related topic. They didn't seem to have concerned editors and I've heard others echo these statements.

Most of these have been starters or quick intros and over a couple years old, although potentially useful. I have downloaded a few and read through the entire postrgres one in under an hour.

I am reading AngularJS Web App Dev Cookbook from packt and it's a pretty good read.

I'm the author - thank you! Always great to hear positive feedback. Most of what's been said here stems from truth in their publishing process. They do seem to churn out a large amount of content, and I sense that their higher quality titles stem from the author having to make the push for excellence.

This is pretty neat, but I wonder why not download an epub or pdf version of the book right away as well:

  var downloadurl = 'https://www.packtpub.com/ebook_download/'+getBookUrl.split('/')[2]+'/epub';
  request(downloadurl)
    .pipe(require('fs')
      .createWriteStream('./books/book_'+getBookUrl.split('/')[2]+'.epub'));

Oh and btw, for those not aware of this yet, if you use gmail, you can use example+spam@gmail.com and it will arrive in your inbox, but more easy to label as spam and auto-delete if they start spamming.

Packt tends to publish books of wildly different quality, some of them are good, while others are lousy written and full of mistakes (not talking about spelling errors here, but software bugs).

Also, they seem to don't know you can use colours in ebooks. I see no excuse for not having syntax highlighting in a programming ebooks. It is just lousy management from their part.

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