[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

On Sat, Jun 1, 2024 at 7:31 PM Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote: the lack of brevity of modern text. I got to thinking about the old days and what might have gone wrong with book production that got us where we are today. early pioneers in the area of moving from typesetters to print on demand... do you feel a bit like the Manhattan project - did you maybe put too much power into the hands of folks who probably shouldn't have that power? typesetting to the digital era was an eyeblink in history but do y'all recall how it went down? Were you surprised when folks settled on word processors in favor of markup? Do you think we've progressed in the area of ease of creating documentation and printing it making it viewable and accurate since 1980? the evolution of documents and printing, so I figure it's fair game for TUHS and isn't yet COFF :). I think your other topic is closely related but I chose this one to reply to. I own something well north of 10,000 technical and engineering books so I will appoint myself as an amateur librarian. When I was younger, I had the false notion that anything new is good. This attitude permates a lot of society. Including professional libraries. They have a lot of collection management practices around deciding what and when to pitch something and a big one is whether the work is still in print, while a more sophisticated collection will also take into account circulation numbers (how often it is checked out). A lot of that is undoubtedly the real costs surrounding storing and displaying something (an archived book has a marginal cost, a publically accessible displayed book presumably has a higher associated cost) as well as the desire to remain current and provide value to the library's membership. From what I have seen, there isn't much notion of retaining or promoting a particular work unless it remains in print. As an example, K&R C is still in print and would be retained by most libraries. The whole thing becomes a bit ouroboros because that leads to more copies being printed, and it remaining in collections, and being read. Obviously, this is a case of a great piece of work benefiting from the whole ordeal. But for more niche topics, that kind of feedback loop doesn't happen. So the whole thing comes down in a house of cards... the publisher guesses how many books to print, a glut of them are produced, they enter circulation, and then it goes out of print in a few years. A few years later it is purged from the public libraries. As an end user, one benefit to this collapse is that used books are basically flooded into the market and you can get many books for a fraction of their retail price used.. but it becomes difficult to know _what_ to get if you don't have an expert guide or somewhere to browse and select for yourself. So why does this all matter to your more meta question of why less great books? There is less to no money in it nowadays for authors. The above example of library circulation represented a large number of guaranteed sales to wealthy institutions (academic and government = wealth, don't let them pretend otherwise). Except now many libraries have downsized their physical collections to make room for multimedia or just lower density use of space. So there are less guaranteed sales. Another facet of the same coin, one reason printed books are great has to do with the team surrounding their production. If you look near the colophon, you will often find a textbook will have quite a few people involved in moving a manuscript to production. This obviously costs a lot of money. As things move more to ebook and print on demand, it's an obvious place to cut publishing expenses and throw all the work directly onto the author. That may result in cheaper books and maybe(?) more revenue for the author, but it won't have the same quality that a professional publishing team can bring to the table. As to my deliberate decision to accumulate the dead trees and ink, it's because although online docs are great I find my best learning is offline while I use the online docs more like mental jogs for a particular API or refamiliarizing myself with the problem domain. I have some grandeur ambitions that first involve a large scanning project but that will have to await more self funding. Regards, Kevin