Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
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Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
1–10 of 39 posts
Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
#2Pretty 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).
Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
#3Pretty 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.
Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
#4My 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.
Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
#5My 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.
Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
#6My 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.
Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
#7My 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.
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.
Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 fo…
Other than O'Reilly, I think most publishers still insist on MSWord for submissions.
Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
#9My 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 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.
Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
#10My 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.
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.