Dear Terry,
Whatever else may be true of VDM and LAP, their practice with respect to PhD theses is predatory. There is something wrong with any publisher offering to publish a book sight unseen.
Your views on the publishing industry are inaccurate with respect to academic and scientific publishing. None of the nearly 90 academic, scientific, or scholarly presses in the list I posted produces airport books. One or two have had surprise best sellers that got to the airport bookstore market through a secondary paperback publisher. But let's be serious — when is the last time you saw a book from Edinburgh, Oxford, Brill or Duckworth next to John Grisham in an airport?
Outside the 90 top research publishers, there are many more good publishers who produce carefully selected, well edited books. These will not become best sellers. They will do well for authors willing to revise a PhD thesis into a serious book. While VDM may publish a few serious books, these are invisible. The companies in the VDM group release over 50,000 titles a month — 600,000 titles a year. There is no way that a company of that size can pay attention to the content of each titles. They bury occasional good titles in a pile of dross, and they do not market any of their books effectively.
You may believe that everything is changing — and you may even be right. One of the changes, however, is the problem of information overload, and people need a reason to order one of the estimated 2,000,000 or so new books published every year. (I don't know whether this estimate includes those 600,000 VDM titles.)
An author needs a respectable publisher to influence positive university decisions for hiring and promotion. Many universities look on LAP and VDM as predatory publishers. Even the decision to publish with VDM or LAP works against an author. It suggests that an author lacks proper judgment. It also suggests that he or she lacks the ability to publish with a serious press, not even one of the many small but serious publishers who release those 2,000,000 or so titles a year. Universities do not make decisions based on airport books or a distribution deal with one of the global big six. What they look for is a serious book produced by any responsible book publisher with proper editing and production. That is not the VDM model.
There are differences of opinion on all matters involving university life and research. As a result, there must be those who agree with your gloomy opinion of Oxford, Cambridge, Chicago, MIT, California, Edinburgh, Brill, Harvard, Bloomsbury Academic, Blackwell and the other publishers on the Norwegian list of top research publishers. Such a list of what you describe as "previously prestigious publishers" may be a "a tool of conservatism to attempt to keep things the way they were." For my part, I don't see Oxford or MIT as "previously" prestigious. They are still prestigious publishers in my view, and I remain interested in the books they publish.
Given my choice, I would rather publish with a press such as Chicago or Cambridge than with a publisher such as VDM. Economics does play a role, so this requires writing a book that will attract enough readers to justify the investment needed for a properly edited book. It doesn't require airport sales or a film option.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Home Page http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design> Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman About Me Page http://about.me/ken_friedman
Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China
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