Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/sep/04/academics-are-being-hoodwinked-into-writing-books-nobody-can-buy

by samclemens • 11 years ago

216 94 11 years ago

theguardian.com

m-i-l• 11 years ago

Reminds 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...

caminante• 11 years ago

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!

patio113• 11 years ago

Academics 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.

jakobegger2• 11 years ago

I think you drastically overestimate the quality of the books this article talks about. These publishers will publish any rubbish you give them just to profit from selling to librarians who do not understand enough of the subject matter to know they are being scammed.

I've been contacted on Facebook by these scam publishers, inquiring if I'd like to publish some of my university essays.

There are plenty of alternatives. Most of the niche knowledge is distributed via scientific journals and conference proceedings. And many scientific publishers will happily publish books on any obscure topic, if you pay for printing.

Scientific publishing has plenty of problems, but these kinds of "publishers" are the worst; they leech off already stretched library budgets for short term profits without providing any value to society at all.

patio113• 11 years ago

I don't think we disagree very much about the likely level of subject-specific due diligence these publishers will do. I think we disagree very much about the likely level of subject-specific due diligence done by any publisher on any title picked at random from a university library.

Peer review is, like Santa, a story we tell to motivate little children; academics (particularly in the humanities) are their own QC departments.

And many scientific publishers will happily publish books on any obscure topic, if you pay for printing.

I feel like I have to say "I do not understand the relevance of this fact to the claim that the academic press is a staunch bulwark against incorrect facts receiving its imprimatur."

librvf7• 11 years ago

I've been contacted on Facebook by these scam publishers

Which publishers? If they are scams they should be exposed.

The linked article included no verifiable details.

a3_nm• 11 years ago

Why do these books have to cost $150? The academics won't be getting this money, those publishers essentially won't be involved in helping improve the book, and it doesn't cost $150 nowadays to get something published, even if you want a printed version.

amouat• 11 years ago

Because it's a scam. The publisher makes money by tricking libraries into buying the titles.

garbal• 11 years ago

As an academic I check out and buy super specialized books all the time. $150 is not too expensive if it can save me a few hours of work by summarizing an esoteric topic, which frequently is the case. The publisher doesn't matter, just the reputation of the author.

This is not beach reading, it is an input to an industrial process.

notahacker2• 11 years ago

It's weird, because HN is usually the first place to downvote people into oblivion for complaining about how outrageous it is that B2B App X costs $15 per month when the majority of software aimed at consumers now sells for 99 cents or is given away for free.

B2B App X generally doesn't have the unique content or extremely niche audience of the hardback, heavily revised version of one's Phd thesis either.

datashovel8• 11 years ago

So if I understand correctly, we should depend on a corporation to decide where these books end up and who has access to them? It sounds like a terrible idea to me. Not all great thinkers / researchers / inventors end up being University professors.

If it doesn't end up being a book or article or in some way shape or form in writing, that the professor wants anxiously for every human in the world to read about, then chances are it wasn't worth writing about anyways.

coliveira• 11 years ago

The mistake here is that professors don't write for "every human in the world". They write specifically for a small number of people who are well versed in the research topic they work on. While it is possible that this information might be useful to others, this will usually happen as a consequence, not as the primary goal.

jimhefferon3• 11 years ago

The alternative to these $150 books is not $7.50 books. It is "no book."

I disagree. One alternative, for instance, is online publication of a .pdf. These are available to anyone, regardless of location, time zone, or ability to pay.

evgen• 11 years ago

Do these throw-away PDFs have an ISBN you can put on the CV? No? In that case, from the perspective of the academic, they are useless.

oneJob• 11 years ago

My wife and many friends are academics. They don't exactly just type the thing up. Writing books for them is a painstaking process during which they sacrifice and put their blood, sweat, and tears into those pages.

I think this article is saying, there is a disingenuous motive on the part of the publisher. The article does not seem to imply that the authors are complicit by playing along and pumping out the academic equivalent to pulp-fiction. When an academic puts their name on a published piece of work, it's a serious thing. To accomplish something worth attaching one's name to, it's not economically feasible for the vast majority of academics to write pdf books pro-bono. Often their already barely making a livable salary and have their plates full. To expect them to write books for free is not at all reasonable.

I agree with the other commenter that this is indeed a good outcome. Paying academics to write these niche books is paying to build the modern Library of Alexandria. Walking through a top tier university's library, one can't help but be in awe of the wealth of knowledge being accumulated. And it has value. Some today. Some down the future. But it has value.

I myself have made use of several of these esoteric books, and could tell that they'd barely, if ever, been read. I couldn't help but feel some gratitude toward the author for writing something so wonderful given it feeling like they'd written it for me and a few dozen other people. But then, others used the products I created based on that work. And so, in that sense, they wrote for those people too.

daniel-levin• 11 years ago

Are you the same Jim Hefferon who wrote the free (as in freedom and beer) linear algebra text [0]? If so, I'd first like to thank you (your book is great) and then agree that it is possible to publish a .pdf online.

That said, patio11 is talking about writing books in highly specialised academic areas. Linear algebra is standard fare for an undergraduate curriculum - taught at thousands of universities - using innumerable textbooks. So it is not something highly specialised. It is conceivable that your book was largely inspired by other linear algebra books, if indirectly. For instance, you might have had strong opinions about why a particular approach does not work [1], and chose not to follow it. The search space has been reduced by authors who have come before. An academic writing a book in a more specialised area would probably not have the luxury of a writing precedent and would have to figure out a lot themselves. This translates to more time spent on a book for which they would otherwise receive no reward.

Of course, it is possible that this premise is false and that it is easier for a researcher to write a book on their own research specialty.

I would imagine that your research appeals to 'a very, very niche audience'. Would you consider spending a lot of time and effort on a book (.pdf) in your research area - for no material reward? To be read by a very small audience? Orders of magnitude smaller than undergraduates looking for a good linear algebra text?

[0] http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/ [1] I certainly do - I dislike Anton and Rorres

peterarmstrong4• 11 years ago

The alternative is absolutely not "no book". Academic books can do extremely well as ebooks.

I'm cofounder of Leanpub, and some of our bestselling books (https://leanpub.com/bookstore/earnings_in_last_7_days/all/al...) are academic books about data science written by professors. This includes our #1 book this week (https://leanpub.com/artofdatascience).

These books have free minimum prices, $15 or so suggested prices, and do very well for their authors -- both by royalties earned and by number of copies sold.

The key point here is that if you're typically earning $10 or more in royalties (yes, royalties) per paid book sale, then a few thousand book sales can add up to being meaningful, fast. And yes, this can even happen with academic books that have a free minimum price...

Blahah• 11 years ago

That has little to do with the fact that they are ebooks, and everything to do with the fact that they are about data science. Just about the sexiest 'academic' topic right now, and in extremely high demand outside academia. For the vast majority of academic books, there is simply little or no demand.

roel_v4• 11 years ago

The book you list as your #1 book is most certainly not an 'academic' book. Just because a book is written by an academic, does not make it an academic book. Just the byline gives it away ("A Guide for Anyone Who Works with Data"), but the description even more so: "This book describes, simply and in general terms, the process of analyzing data. ... This book is a distillation of their experience in a format that is applicable to both practitioners and managers in data science. "

In other words, "we've written down our experiences as applied statisticians". Which is fine and actually it sounds like it would be useful for me, but it's not "academic publishing".

rayiner• 11 years ago

Data science is not a niche academic field by any means. It's a high-growth employment sector with probably tens of thousands of practitioners interested.

URSpider94• 11 years ago

I would wager that the cost of printing is not what is setting the high prices for these books. Short-run publishing is quite economical these days. It's the overhead cost of running these organizations -- sales forces to sell to libraries, editors, proofreaders, marketing folks, etc.

Switching to e-book will save very little of that money.

Sure, it allows for self-publishing, but a self-published Ebook is not going to look great on your CV, and the royalties are not going to matter much if only a few hundred people are interested in the topic.

j2kun2• 11 years ago

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 me and I think for most mathematicians.

The standard process for academic writers is to typeset an entire book themselves in LaTeX regardless of the publisher (they tend not to publish-as-they-write, though that could conceivably change). Leanpub is unlikely to convince book authors in math by forcing them to convert to Markdown, especially for book writing when cross-chapter labels for theorems and exercises are common. If Leanpub wants to attract academic writers in math they need a sturdy tool that converts a LaTeX book to the Markdown flavor that Leanpub needs. But that's a crap-ton of work (especially considering third-party libraries like tikz) with an unclear contribution to Leanpub's bottom line.

Of course, the alternative is to post only a pdf format, but that kind of defeats the point of Leanpub which is that they generate multiple formats. A service like gumroad would be cheaper per transaction.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 11 years ago

Of the 30 books on the front page of your bestselling list, the closest things to an 'academic book' I see are all texts designed to accompany Coursera courses.

Those aren't academic books, those are introductory text books.

dang• 11 years ago

Academics spend years writing books nobody will buy.

And always will. My favorite example: http://www.npr.org/2012/04/16/150723840/for-japanese-linguis... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8275064).

anta40• 11 years ago

£80 is definitely not cheap. I'm curious what factors make those textbooks so pricey.

patio113• 11 years ago

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.)

hellofunk2• 11 years ago

This 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.

maaaats• 11 years ago

Alot of publishers also do a shotgun approach to find developers to write a book for them. I've been contacted several times to act as reviewer or even write the book myself about a framework named Libgdx. All because I have a Github repo with some example code for a single feature, that's somewhat popular.

The repo is many years old, and I no longer write mobile games. So I'm not a good match as an author for such a book. Still, if I'd say yes, they would've published a shitty book. And I can't say I didn't think about it, vanity..

leaveyou2• 11 years ago

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

AlexeyBrin• 11 years ago

Packt Publishing is worse than Apress. They basically take a subject, say Cocos2d-x, and publish a bunch of shitty books that cloud the book market with outdated information and bad code practices.

Packt and Appress ebooks are not even properly formatted for a programming subject (text alignment, code highlighting ...). Compare any Packt/Appress ebook with Pragmatic or LeanPub ebook formatting, the difference is staggering.

librvf7• 11 years ago

This article could easily be expanded to include software developers as well as academics

companies like Apress

Your 1-paragraph HN comment has more verifiable (relevant) facts than the entire article linked. The article doesn't need to be expanded, a different one needs to be written by someone willing to be more specific.

raverbashing• 11 years ago

And of course the question is, how much would the academic make with those sales? (I'm guessing not much)

PeterisP• 11 years ago

Possibly a negative amount - some of these publishers do, in essence, a classic "who's who"/vanity publishing scam where the profit comes from the author paying for a bunch of expensive copies, and they usually won't even be sold to anyone else.

tarekkurdy• 11 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M68wcB6L0s

madaxe_again2• 11 years ago

And 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.

harry82• 11 years ago

name the book, author and publisher. If what you say is true they don't deserve protection.

Thriptic• 11 years ago

It sounds like what they are referring to is a course reader published by their own university.

kwhitefoot2• 11 years ago

Did you complain to the university? Which university? Sounds like a low grade institution to me. When I studied physics at Exeter in the mid 70s there was a lively trade in second hand books and I don't think that any of the books specified that they had to be the absolutely latest edition. Nor did the faculty write a book and demand that we bought it; I think that might have caused a lot of trouble then but students now seem to be more docile than we were. We mostly didn't do exercises from textbooks, we had tutors who set work so it didn't matter which edition you used so long as the contents were correct.

madaxe_again2• 11 years ago

Durham. Definitely not low grade - was top in the country for Physics while I was there.

Most tutors set work outside of books, but there were definitely a few who were rinsing students for all it was worth.

Edit: seems they've gone further down the textbook route - here's their justification on the matter - https://www.dur.ac.uk/physics/students/textbooks/

brohoolio• 11 years ago

The article states people are getting hoodwinked but then goes on to blame academics.

"So why don’t academics simply stay away from the greedy publishers? The only answer I can think of is vanity."

Or that the publishers are misrepresenting how the books might sell.

harry82• 11 years ago

Why didn't the author name the publisher? So librarians, unfamiliar with esoteric fields can put a black mark next to that publisher's name and only buy from that publisher if requested or approved by an academic in that field. Surely the reputation damage that should be inflicted would stop such practises if they exist. But we have a claim with no evidence at this point.

librvf7• 11 years ago

I agree, the original article doesn't hold up well under scrutiny. Anonymous source and no verifiable, relevant facts-- even facts that should be easy to obtain.

georgeek• 11 years ago

One quality specialized publisher is Now Publishers : http://www.nowpublishers.com/ Quality is managed by having leading academics have a say in the editorial decisions.

Their conditions are somehow better than more established ones. Authors still hold the copyright over the material, and according to the librarians at my institution, their campus and course packs are much cheaper to other publishers.

DrNuke• 11 years ago

Broadly speaking, cheap e-books from non-stellar academics are an incredible amount of data leaked for free: top peer-reviewed journals are not cheap at all and relevant conferences proceedings are often run on a pay-for-view scheme. The non-stellar academic from Windy Hill University, Nowhere, will sell a good summary of his/her field and an up to date literature review for less than $20. Bargain.

1971genocide• 11 years ago

I can tell you are not a millennial student or else you wont have that view.

We are made to buy extremely expensive books and waste time reading crap books all the time.

The best books in my field were written randomly over the last 300 years.

I think ALL information should be free in the digital age. its the maximum rate of efficiency.

There are 6 billion people in the world without a proper high class uni education like myself.

How is it that we are okay supplying free weapons to poor people but go to great deal to restrict the supply of information ?

wolfgke• 11 years ago

Relevant:

Aaron Swartz - Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...

dalke8• 11 years ago

"we are made to buy extremely expensive books"

One of the thing about young people is they rarely have a sense of history. The relevant question is, how does that compare to, say, a Gen X student? We have plenty of archival evidence for that. One such is this newspaper article from 1988, titled "Students pay a high price for college textbooks" at https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=19881110&id=... . It starts off "The price of textbooks will make you cry."

The end of the first column continues "For the last 50 to 60 years students said exactly the same thing about book prices." Yes, Baby Boomers made the same complaint you just did.

The larger context is that starting in the 1980s cultural views shifted so that college should be seen as prerequisite job training, and not as a way to expand the mind, understand the world, and better oneself. Thus, colleges could justify price hikes by saying it would lead to a better jobs in the future, which could pay off the increased debt. Where Boomers could work for the summer to pay off a year of school, modern students must pay back loans for the next decade.

But that has relatively little to do with the price of textbooks. Even if the textbooks were free, it would only mean the colleges would hike the prices elsewhere to maximize profit extraction.

kwhitefoot2• 11 years ago

How is it that we are okay supplying free weapons to poor people but go to great deal to restrict the supply of information ?

I hope that was a rhetorical question.

n0us• 11 years ago

One of the best emails I've received in a while was from the UVA alumni association letting me know that I would retain library access, including access to JSTOR, because there is no way I could afford to outright purchase everything I want to read.

librvf7• 11 years ago

These may sound like stories of concern to academics alone. But the problem is this: much of the time that goes into writing these books is made possible through taxpayers’ money. And who buys these books? Well, university libraries – and they, too, are paid for by taxpayers. Meanwhile, the books are not available for taxpayers to read – unless they have a university library card.

In the US, taxpayers are said to be spending $139bn a year on research, and in the UK, £4.7bn. Too much of that money is disappearing into big pockets.

What is this garbage? Why not let an interesting article about a specific problem (academic publishing scams) stand on its own? Why pour on sensationalized, over-simplified, misleading "context?"

According to to study where those numbers came from, the $139bn the federal government spends on "research" is a part of a larger pool of "funding for research" that includes non-government sources, which is like $450bn. Universities (not just the libraries) are getting about $60bn from the big pool.

In other words: the study, at least the results referenced by The Guardian article, does not say ANYTHING about the flow of money from taxpayer wallets to university libraries. Based on the evidence presented, the fraction of university library funding from taxpayer dollars could be anywhere from 0% to 100%. This is blatant dishonesty from The Guardian.

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf14307

Oh and one more thing: The "good" part of the article is written by an anonymous source with no verifiable facts (no publisher names, no book names). I have no real reason to dispute its authenticity, the idea certainly seems plausible, but I can not verify any of the claims being made without basically starting my own study from scratch.

jordanpg3• 11 years ago

Wow -- apparently The Guardian actually has a recurring section called "Academics Anonymous"??? That seems like an interesting story in its own right.

Well done pointing this out. This supposed academic, is doing palpable damage to his/her own industry.

This is the kind of article we can expect to be quoted by the right-wing crazies who want to shut down all universities.

notahacker2• 11 years ago

As a commenter beneath the article pointed out, it also rather clashes the Guardian's own one day seminars on "How to Write an Academic Paper and Get It Published", a snip at £249 per person...

roel_v4• 11 years ago

"This is blatant dishonesty from The Guardian."

Well, it is The Guardian...

librvf7• 11 years ago

And yet, the article has 200+ upvotes and the top-rated comment thread completely accepts the frame of the article and its assumptions.

jordanpg3• 11 years ago

I wonder how much of this is simply a function of the massive overpopulation of graduate programs and the growing need to fill out CVs with publications? I know that this has been happening for years in the form of obscure journals that no one reads or cares about.

Goladus• 11 years ago

Has The Guardian Been Bought By The Onion?

http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/09/05/the-guardian-been-b...

nebulous1• 11 years ago

Why wouldn't the answer be to have the libraries not buy books from unscrupulous publishers?

Zigurd• 11 years ago

This is why, if you want to be an author publishing through the more or less conventional publishing industry, you need a first-rate agent, and a knowledge of who is a first-rate publisher.

There's a big difference between a global publisher placing your book in their professional publishing imprints versus an obscure publisher leaching a bit of money out of libraries. The first-rate publisher will also get your expensive book into their subscription programs that they market to corporate subscribers, for example.

If you have a good agent, they will steer you toward the goals you are pursuing, if you communicate those goals clearly. That's where some knowledge of which publishers have the best and/or most widely read books in your field is important.

If you want to get your book into the more-widely sold trade paperback format, you need to tune your proposal to that goal. Most publishers require you to do some competitive analysis in your proposal. That's going to be important guidance for where your book ends up.

copsarebastards• 11 years ago

They aren't being hoodwinked, they're just not writing the books to be bought. Nobody goes into academia hoping to write the next bestseller.

VIRGIE11111• 11 years ago

Fantastic writing ! I Appreciate the info , Does anyone know if I could get ahold of a sample 1999 ASI Lite - CF form to edit ?

Sherice• 11 years ago

Hey Virgie11111, I found a blank fillable 1999 ASI Lite - CF form here: http://pdf.ac/ahd5Bk

Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy

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