71–80 of 98 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Do these throw-away PDFs have an ISBN you can put on the CV? No? In that case, from the perspective of the academic, they are useless.
Academics spend years writing books nobody will buy. That's practically the definition of academic writing. They go into incredible amount of depths for a very, very niche audience: other academics interested in, e.g., the experience of women in Japanese detective novels of the 19th century. (n.b. Actually a book, assuming I am remembering all the details correctly. An advisor spent years on it.) This is exactly the…
The alternative is absolutely not "no book". Academic books can do extremely well as ebooks. I'm cofounder of Leanpub, and some of our bestselling books ( https://leanpub.com/bookstore/earnings_in_last_7_days/all/al... ) are academic books about data science written by professors. This includes our #1 book this week ( https://leanpub.com/artofdatascience ). These books have free minimum prices, $15 or so suggested pr…
My personal experience: I've tried using Leanpub and found issues with the way it handles mathematics. For example, the last time I checked (maybe around June) the TeX support in their Markdown was not developed enough to handle aligned equations, which is a big sticking point for me and I think for most mathematicians.
The standard process for academic writers is to typeset an entire book themselves in LaTeX regardless of the publisher (they tend not to publish-as-they-write, though that could conceivably change). Leanpub is unlikely to convince book authors in math by forcing them to convert to Markdown, especially for book writing when cross-chapter labels for theorems and exercises are common. If Leanpub wants to attract academic writers in math they need a sturdy tool that converts a LaTeX book to the Markdown flavor that Leanpub needs. But that's a crap-ton of work (especially considering third-party libraries like tikz) with an unclear contribution to Leanpub's bottom line.
Of course, the alternative is to post only a pdf format, but that kind of defeats the point of Leanpub which is that they generate multiple formats. A service like gumroad would be cheaper per transaction.
Academics spend years writing books nobody will buy. That's practically the definition of academic writing. They go into incredible amount of depths for a very, very niche audience: other academics interested in, e.g., the experience of women in Japanese detective novels of the 19th century. (n.b. Actually a book, assuming I am remembering all the details correctly. An advisor spent years on it.) This is exactly the…
The alternative is absolutely not "no book". Academic books can do extremely well as ebooks. I'm cofounder of Leanpub, and some of our bestselling books ( https://leanpub.com/bookstore/earnings_in_last_7_days/all/al... ) are academic books about data science written by professors. This includes our #1 book this week ( https://leanpub.com/artofdatascience ). These books have free minimum prices, $15 or so suggested pr…
Those aren't academic books, those are introductory text books.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Are you the same Jim Hefferon who wrote the free (as in freedom and beer) linear algebra text [0]? If so, I'd first like to thank you (your book is great) and then agree that it is possible to publish a .pdf online. 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 innume…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know of nothing, including the power grid and Google's home page, which works 'seamlessly'. If you live in the Caribbean and there's a hurricane then it will take extra time to process your ILL request, just like your power or internet service may go down. But OCLC Resource Sharing is used in 49 countries, so while it's not perfect, it is solidly present even in 'third world countries.' Yes, ILL works through publi…
Fair enough, 49 countries of the almost 200 on the planet have Inter-Library loans. Seems it may be about on-par with how many countries / populations are without internet access. However, if we were to measure how much of the 49 countries' population truly had reasonable access to a library (within reasonable distance of their home) versus the total population who has access to the internet, I think we'd probably se…
Absolutely true. Yet not that relevant. Data transfer cost isn't a major factor.
The journals in my fields are all electronic. They no longer have paper distributions. As a result, the library no longer needs to store a physical copy, and people can retrieve a copy from their office instead of spending the hour to so to find it in the library and photocopy it.
Great savings, right?
This also means that the publisher, as copyright holder, can enforce access restrictions. For example, I (as the member of the public) can use the chemistry library of a large university about an hour away to get online access to some of these journals, without paying an extra fee. However, I am not allowed to print or make copies of these articles. Once upon a time, when everything was in paper, there was no way for the publisher to make that restriction. Precisely because information transfer is cheaper, it's now possible for the publisher to have more fine-grained control.
As a result, ILL services have gotten worse. The rise of internet-based document retrieval services with limits on public (non-student/non-staff) access has meant that modern library users may need to travel more now, in order to visit a library with a given journal subscription, than 25 years ago, when an ILL request would have been possible.
See http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/how-copyright-... for "The Digital Paradox: How Copyright Laws Keep E-Books Locked Up." Quoting from it:
> If a student in Freiburg wants to read the hard-copy version of a book from the university library in Basel, he or she can simply order it via an interlibrary loan. But if only an electronic version is available, interlibrary loans are generally not an option. The student has no choice but to climb into a train and head to Switzerland to read the book on a university computer.
This sounds like the European version of the scenario you presented, only it was solved with the 'quite dated' ILL system, and exists with e-books.
In passing you highlighted the underlying reason. The publishing companies would like it if the laws and technology were set up so that making a copy of a journal article at a library is "piracy" (I prefer the term 'copyright infringement'), unless they get paid for making the copy, and they as copyright holders should be in charge of determining what the price is. (The ILL system addressed copyright payments through RAND-like copyright clearance agreements.)
Technology which makes it easier for copyright holders to control their copyright makes it harder for people to use the same materials. Either worthy people without the funds can't get access to a paper or there is 'rampant piracy'.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
My wife and many friends are academics. They don't exactly just type the thing up. Writing books for them is a painstaking process during which they sacrifice and put their blood, sweat, and tears into those pages. 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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Are you the same Jim Hefferon who wrote the free (as in freedom and beer) linear algebra text [0]? If so, I'd first like to thank you (your book is great) and then agree that it is possible to publish a .pdf online. 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 innume…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Do these throw-away PDFs have an ISBN you can put on the CV? No? In that case, from the perspective of the academic, they are useless.
Broadly speaking, cheap e-books from non-stellar academics are an incredible amount of data leaked for free: top peer-reviewed journals are not cheap at all and relevant conferences proceedings are often run on a pay-for-view scheme. The non-stellar academic from Windy Hill University, Nowhere, will sell a good summary of his/her field and an up to date literature review for less than $20. Bargain.
I can tell you are not a millennial student or else you wont have that view. We are made to buy extremely expensive books and waste time reading crap books all the time. The best books in my field were written randomly over the last 300 years. I think ALL information should be free in the digital age. its the maximum rate of efficiency. There are 6 billion people in the world without a proper high class uni education…
I hope that was a rhetorical question.
And students are being hoodwinked into buying them. The books also often include minutiae which change from edition to edition, so you have to get the nth edition in order to take your class - because in physics, for instance, there are Q&A in the books which differ between editions. The main book we had to get was written by two of the lecturers, and was £300. It was so half-assedly bound that you had to cut the pag…