11–20 of 39 posts
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.
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.
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.
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I am actually the author of an as-yet-unpublished book by Packt and have a few things to say about their publishing process.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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
O'Reilly's insistence on making everyone use git (including non-programmers) seems a bit nuts to me.
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).
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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…
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 am reading AngularJS Web App Dev Cookbook from packt and it's a pretty good read.
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 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.