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Hi Ken, I'll reiterate. 1. Profitable publishing that can afford the usual editor time (an editor doing around 8 books a year or less) is restricted to mass public sales. 2. Academic publishers get by economically with a combination of high retail prices and guaranteed sales to courses with large numbers of students(i.e. books published as confirmed course texts ). 3. Increasingly, the main roles of reviewers of academic books is to evaluate the likelihood that there will be a strong economic market for the book being reviewed. 4. The criteria for academic books to be economically successful in an undergraduate market in which curricula were set some time ago frequently conflict with the idea of books having value because they publish cutting edge new knowledge. 5. Change is happening faster. The window of value of new knowledge is smaller and more tightly defined. The lifetime of sales value of a book with good quality new knowledge occurs both sooner and for less time than in years past. 6. Book prices are being driven down in customer expectations. In the proportions of book economics this cuts the proportion of income available for editorial support. 7. Distribution is required more globally to achieve necessary sales numbers. This has its own costs and time constraints. 8. Changes in knowledge consumption towards modular mix and match chunks smaller than conveniently presented in book format and with need for interconnection with other sources.. 8. Strong competition from alternative channels, particularly free online sources (e.g. Researchgate, Academia, Google Scholar etc) The consequences of the above create a perfect storm for classic editor-based academic publishing of quality new knowledge: less time for editing, less profit, driven by marketability and ease of teaching rather than knowledge quality, inappropriate format, less money available for editing, pressure on going to press sooner, smaller sales window, increased competition. Second, it results in academic publishing being a poor proxy of quality of knowledge or reported research. The same scenario is also increasingly evident in academic journal publishing. It seen for example in criteria given to reviewers that try to elicit market information about whether enough other people would be interested in reading (and hence paying for reading) an article. The above publishing factors act ON researchers and universities, rather than researchers shaping publishing decisions. I suggest the implication is the status quo on the valuation of the role of book and journal publishing is in significant transition. Historical academic viewpoints about the importance of publishing that might have been valid only a few years ago are fast becoming irrelevant. Best regards , Terry --- Dr Terence Love PhD(UWA), BA(Hons) Engin. PGCEd, FDRS, AMIMechE, MISI Honorary Fellow IEED, Management School Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK Director, Love Services Pty Ltd PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks Western Australia 6030 Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848 Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629 [log in to unmask] -- -----Original Message----- From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ken Friedman Sent: Thursday, 31 October 2013 1:31 PM To: Colleague Subject: Re: Avoid Lambert Academic Publishing and Verlag Dr Mueller 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<h ttp://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 ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------