Get a Packt Pub book a day for free • Hacker News Board

Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free

#31

Post by zwischenzug » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 8:40 PM UTC

erroneousfunk wrote: post #25

adam-a wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free

#32

Post by mfrisbie » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 10:12 PM UTC

buckbova wrote: post #18

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.

Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free

#33

Post by cpayne » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 11:51 PM UTC

organsnyder wrote: post #19

coleifer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am actually the author of an as-yet-unpublished book by Packt and have a few things to say about their publishing process.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.

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.

Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free

#34

Post by cpayne » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 11:55 PM UTC

jordigh wrote: post #22

organsnyder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prefe…

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 dr…

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...

Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free

#35

Post by coleifer » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 1:38 AM UTC

organsnyder wrote: post #19

coleifer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free

#36

Post by greg_data » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 7:56 AM UTC

techpeace wrote: post #16

Matachines wrote: post #2

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).

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.

Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free

#37

Post by lawry » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 10:03 AM UTC

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.

Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free

#38

Post by arooaroo » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 10:13 AM UTC

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.

Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free

#39

Post by JadeNB » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 3:53 PM UTC

cpayne wrote: post #34

jordigh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dr…

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).