Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy
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Re: Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy
#2Reminds me of Business Secrets of the Pharaohs [0]. But does anyone actually enter in to this process without understanding what it is? Looks like is is a widely known practice [1].
[0] http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/entertainment/articles/2012-12/...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_open_access_publishi...
Re: Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy
#3Academics 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 result the market should hope for: a profitable method which gets academics to write down very-incredibly-niche ideas and then put copies of them exactly where someone would expect to find very-incredibly-niche ideas. The alternative to these $150 books is not $7.50 books. It is "no book." They do not meaningfully trade off with equally-in-depth blog posts, because academics are not scored on, and hence do not as a matter of practice actually sit down and write, book-length blog posts.
Re: Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy
#4£80 is definitely not cheap.
I'm curious what factors make those textbooks so pricey.
Re: Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy
#5This article could easily be expanded to include software developers as well as academics. I've seen several excellent developers with strong reputations contributing to the open source community get "hoodwinked" into rushing out shallow books for companies like Apress. I've seen other developers also get sucked into the game, only to see less income from the work in one year as you'd need to buy a modest used car -- after months of at least half-time effort. The market and problem for these books is a bit different than the market described in this article, but the symptoms on the writers is often the same.
Re: Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy
#6And of course the question is, how much would the academic make with those sales? (I'm guessing not much)
Re: Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy
#7Reminds me of Business Secrets of the Pharaohs [0]. But does anyone actually enter in to this process without understanding what it is? Looks like is is a widely known practice [1]. [0] http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/entertainment/articles/2012-12/... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_open_access_publishi...
Editor: Nothing's happening and you guys are behind on ad impressions. Anyone have content ideas?
"Freelance" Journalist: Oh! I could do a creative writing prompt as an "Anonymous Academic," sexing up the ordinary academic publishing world with an expose. Bitter college kids will eat that up on social media.
Editor: Guess that works. Run it!
Re: Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy
#8Re: Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy
#9£80 is definitely not cheap. I'm curious what factors make those textbooks so pricey.
They're like software: really cheap at the margin to make the 100,000th copy, really expensive to make the first one. Textbooks are pricey and Harry Potter is not because textbooks sell hundreds of copies and Harry Potter sells hundreds of millions. (With a wee bit of portfolio theory going on where HP also has to pay for advance checks written to all the talented single mothers on welfare who write books in obscurity but who are not J.K. Rowling and do not become billionaires because their books have more typical outcomes and sell ~X00 copies worldwide.)
Re: Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy
#10And 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 pages open.