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Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy

theguardian.com

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Re: Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy

#91

Post by gregjwild »

hellofunk wrote: post #18
leaveyou wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this is a sign that the end of traditional publishing is very near. They milk the last drops from a dying field ?

I'm not sure what you mean by "traditional publishing" but in many cases the books that are being written are primarily sold as ebooks, and part of the larger scam is that consumers can actually buy these books months before they are written with the promise of constant updates. I bought an Apress ebook once that was barely started when I purchased it, but that was not clear at the time. The actual finished book was…

Manning Publications editor here.

Truth be told, we go to early access largely because we think it helps us make sure the book is delivering the goods, collect feedback, and hopefully improve the book as a result. We try to make it very clear how much of the book has been written - indicating what chapters have been written, and make it very clear that the book is unfinished.

Re: Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy

#92

Post by datashovel »

dalke wrote: post #86
datashovel wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm definitely not a fan of DRM, but mentioned it since some people are concerned about it. I think, from the little I have read about this (with regard to the issues we've discussed here), academics in general is kind of screwed up given the power structures in place. This might sound like a broad generalization, and perhaps counter-intuitive, but I think for academic institutions to optimize themselves, they need t…

As I am not an academic but rather an independent researcher working in industry, I have little useful to say about the academic power structure or its future. To get back to why I joined this thread, do you accept that your scenario of having to visit a state university library in person to read someone's "magnum opus" in book form is unlikely enough that it is more fanciful than meaningful? As you are also not an a…

It sounds like you are more of an expert on Inter-Library Loans than I am. If, as it sounds like you are saying, I have access to all publications from all public and private (or maybe not private) libraries in all 49 countries that offer ILL. I'm assuming, for the purposes of this discussion, that all public and private? libraries in those 49 countries participate in this ILL program. As long as I have a library card to one of said libraries, then I think it's safe to say that a publisher who publishes a fixed number of books and sells them exclusively to libraries (public or private?) which may or may not be far away from where I live, is not as big of a problem as I originally thought. Technically one could argue that I have "access" to those books.

Re: Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy

#93

Post by dalke »

datashovel wrote: post #92
dalke wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I am not an academic but rather an independent researcher working in industry, I have little useful to say about the academic power structure or its future. To get back to why I joined this thread, do you accept that your scenario of having to visit a state university library in person to read someone's "magnum opus" in book form is unlikely enough that it is more fanciful than meaningful? As you are also not an a…

It sounds like you are more of an expert on Inter-Library Loans than I am. If, as it sounds like you are saying, I have access to all publications from all public and private (or maybe not private) libraries in all 49 countries that offer ILL. I'm assuming, for the purposes of this discussion, that all public and private? libraries in those 49 countries participate in this ILL program. As long as I have a library car…

I was necessarily incomplete in describing what ILL does since I figured that information was easily available at places like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlibrary_loan and http://www.oclc.org/services/resource-sharing.en.html .

No, you absolutely do not have access to "all publications" - for example, you cannot ask the Library of Congress to send you their copy of the Magna Carta. Some things are too bulky, expensive, or fragile to ship. Remember though that you asked about some academic's "magnum opus", which is unlikely to be restricted that way.

No, not all public and private libraries are members of the OCLC. A search of http://www.oclc.org/contacts/libraries.en.html gives 15K OCLC members and 63K participating libraries around the world. The library at the National Museum of Mysteries (see http://web.randi.org/swift/paranormal-themed-festivals-bring... ) is not listed as one of them.

Remember though that your scenario concerned a state university, and those definitely are members of ILL.

"Technically one could argue that I have "access" to those books."

Yes. Though 'technically' you have access even if you have to fly to the Vatican library to see something in person. I would add the qualifier "relatively low-cost". It's costs me about $12 to get a copy of a journal article though ILL when it costs me about $35 to get it directly from the publisher. The main difference is that I need to wait a week or two. Books, oddly enough, are free.

Re: Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy

#94

Post by datashovel »

dalke wrote: post #93
datashovel wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you are more of an expert on Inter-Library Loans than I am. If, as it sounds like you are saying, I have access to all publications from all public and private (or maybe not private) libraries in all 49 countries that offer ILL. I'm assuming, for the purposes of this discussion, that all public and private? libraries in those 49 countries participate in this ILL program. As long as I have a library car…

I was necessarily incomplete in describing what ILL does since I figured that information was easily available at places like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlibrary_loan and http://www.oclc.org/services/resource-sharing.en.html . No, you absolutely do not have access to "all publications" - for example, you cannot ask the Library of Congress to send you their copy of the Magna Carta. Some things are too bulky, ex…

I concur. Thanks for the conversation.

Re: Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy

#96

Post by j2kun »

peterarmstrong wrote: post #84
j2kun wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Leanpub has a ways to go before it can be useful for academic writing in my field (mathematics and theoretical computer science). 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…

You're correct that we're more expensive per transaction than Gumroad, which is an excellent service. Now, for some books, the amount earned above the minimum price is more than enough to make up the difference: our price sliders work really well to earn extra money for authors. The Leanpub vs. Gumroad question is actually a really interesting one; there are other considerations on both sides. (Gumroad is what I reco…

One thing that's immediate: the only math typesetting language serious math writers ever use is LaTeX, and I think in terms of "math mode" support it would be enough to fully support whatever subset of tex syntax is supported on sites frequented heavily by mathematicians, specifically mathoverflow.com (I believe it's MathJax with some extensions for special scripts and diagrams like [1]). It seems like the technology to get TeX->HTML is already there at mathoverflow, so I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to avoid reinventing the wheel.

The other things are less math specific and more organizationally specific. If I were writing a serious academic math text, it would be full of theorems, corollaries, and exercises which I would refer to in later chapters by a label. For example you might put some simple but tedious computation as an exercise in an earlier chapter and then when using the result in a later proof you can say "The claim that BLAH is Exercise II.4.3." Leanpub appears to currently only have support for figure labels, but in math we often want labels for these other things too, which we can then reference across the entire book. In TeX, anything that is assigned a number can also be assigned a label.

Serious math texts also have a need for bibliographies at the end of each chapter and at the end of the book, and if there's anything a writer doesn't want to do it's alphabetize and manage labels for a hundred references. We have BibTeX for this, but Leanpub appears to have nothing. One could write a tool that translates bibtex output to markdown, but again it's a lot of work.

[1]: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/159655/commutative-diagram...

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