[TUHS] Proliferation of book print styles

[Will Senn]

On 6/1/24 11:03 PM, Kevin Bowling wrote:
> 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
Thanks. This is really clear and while I'd had similar thoughts, I 
hadn't thought through the entire supply chain like this. The publishing 
side is one thing, but the library's role in things. I gotta think some 
more about that - the Mattew Effect, acquisitions, and weeding... 
Seriously, I never thought about the library's outsized influence on 
supply. Duh!

As for digital materials, I'm pretty sure no one on the list is 
unaccustomed to vast amounts of reading digital materials so would 
qualify as experienced consumers at the least, producers most likely, 
and some even experts on the subject. I, for one, read many many pdf (or 
convertable to pdf) works every week. Still, I vastly prefer print for 
serious reading or study. I have learned the value of marking up my text 
and I find myself writing voluminously alongside much of what I read. It 
seems like I have to work much harder, cognitively, to retain material 
that I view online and having my notes disconnected from the 
corresponding material is frustrating. Gotta print important stuff, no 
way around it for me.
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