[dansitu]

I'm an author, and the compensation you're quoting is wildly low.

Beyond that: I've co-written two reasonably successful technical books. The amount of non-writing work that went into them is staggering: editing, reviewing, laying them out, creating illustrations, translating them into different languages, making them available for sale across the world, etc. It requires an unbelievable amount of skill, talent, and hard work.

The raw draft we hand in looks embarrassing beside the finished product.

[psadauskas]

I certainly appreciate your efforts, and the efforts of everyone involved. I know a few authors and copy editors, and it seems like an incredible amount of work to deliver the finished product.

I suppose my snark was more in reference to the textbook market, which seems to be the primary focus of Libgen. Academic textbooks seem primarily to be a way to extract some student loan money into publishers' pockets, with plenty of obvious typos, problems that can't be completed, and new editions every year that simply change the order of chapters without fixing any of those issues.

When I was a student, in several of my technical classes, after every test we'd spend a class correcting the answers provided by the textbook that disagreed with more authoritative sources. Spending $100 for a book that was only half right when I could have bought a real technical book for $40 has made me cynical about the whole industry.

[_emacsomancer_]

I've written numerous technical articles and had to publish them in particular journals for academic promotion/retention reasons, and almost universally the (paid) editors (not the working for free other academic reviewers) added negative value: they introduced errors and I had to spend hours of unnecessary time trying to catch these newly introduced errors, and even then tonnes remained. I distribute the preprints (that paid editors didn't get their hands on) because they're much less error- and typo-ridden then the official published versions.

Anyway, I've got a new list of publishers I'll never publish with, nor use anything they publish as required reading for a class I teach.