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Has the transition to digital markedly increased book sales? I know I only buy ebooks and have done so since it became an option.

uziq wrote:

you are arraigning them for being dry, methodical, over-evidenced, repetitive.

But if you agree with this notion you'll have to concur there's merit in my statement that most good ideas can be reduced to article form, either before or after the publication of a book. It's not an outlandish statement. I never denied books have specific value in academia.

sales for academic monographs were never exactly high. for an academic book to sell in the 1000s was rare in the pre-digital era. 95% of the sales are to university libraries as they are the only buyers who can afford it. private individual readers, again, are not picking up that 220-page, $200 stanford university press monograph.

it would be best if you didn't just glean some random article without context off the internet, when you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

sales of regular trade history books, the sort you find in high-street bookstores, stocked nationwide, seldom sell > 2,500 copies. that's considered a 'good success' by any metric. again, i doubt you understand any of this context. is the 'book dying' and the journal article evidently so much better a format because of book sales? there's just way too much to unpack and explain to even support your argument. sales figures have nothing to do with the suitability or merits of books.

i don't even know why you're still persevering in arguing about academic monographs when people commented on your lack of reading in general. nobody ever expected you to be reading academic monographs for fun. they are specialist texts intended for an audience of academic peers and fellow researchers. useful for cribbing from if you're a student, passing through the university on towards other things, but not exactly riveting reads for a general audience. you're putting way too much emphasis on the format of the academic monograph. you don't read ANYTHING. have you even been to a book store? they don't stock academic monographs! dipshit!

But if you agree with this notion you'll have to concur there's merit in my statement that most good ideas can be reduced to article form, either before or after the publication of a book. It's not an outlandish statement

your statement was that BOOKS could be reduced to a pithy article format, not academic monographs, which are necessarily meant to be long expositions and in-depth scholarly treatments. i said that's bullshit and countered that a life of napoleon wouldn't fit in a journal article. to which you replied 'those are only for hobbyists'. lmfao. it's like you don't know anything about general book-buying audiences.

Last edited by uziq (2020-07-03 03:28:14)

I guess there's a Japanese word (no surprise) for people who buy and collect books but don't read them. I don't know if that extends to having a couple packed bookshelves or cramming them anywhere they can fit and probably shouldn't be stored.

If the former (and not hoarding), it seems like a fairly harmless activity that shouldn't rent space in your head when other people do it.

I myself have a ton of books I haven't read yet. It's called a backlog. There's a few technical ones that are no longer really relevant even for donation and should go into storage or be prepped for recycle, though.

but I never intended for my argument to be about anything other than academic print. 99% of my reading is either articles or reports, other than that it's  news magazine stuff. I read the occasional shitty scifi because it's fun but eh, no. No non fiction I guess. The blockchain book isn't exactly leisurely reading either. Even though I studied history I'm also not all too interested in history books. Perhaps I'm a little dysfunctional in this department.

uziq that's a misinterpretation but perhaps i should've been more clear. I meant Ideas and opinions as in theory, abstraction and interpretation. It's what I pointed towards with your napoleon thing as well. inside my field being security and conflict, outside = economy, sociology, occasionally philosophy, but the professionally produced stuff. We're on different wavelengths here.

The way of the dodo may be a bit strong but I do think they're of lesser importance now and increasingly so, but perhaps we disagree there. When's the last time you saw a historian publish a 10-volume tome on the history of a certain timeperiod? That's already out of the window for quite some time now.

Similarly I'm not so sure the now younger generation of newly tenured researchers and professors will subject their peers to the hurdle of publishing a 300+ page book before giving them acknowledgement, or if publishing multiple books will still be the norm. Perhaps we'll see eminent academics in the future that never did publish an entire book or only a couple at best. It's already the case in some more technical fields.

Larssen wrote:

The way of the dodo may be a bit strong but I do think they're of lesser importance now and increasingly so, but perhaps we disagree there. When's the last time you saw a historian publish a 10-volume tome on the history of a certain timeperiod? That's already out of the window for quite some time now.

this is factually, and absolutely, incorrect. if you read the london, new york or los angeles review of books, you would see that there is a near-constant supply of these things coming out. it has not slowed at all. how would academic publishing houses continue to exist if there wasn't a continual industry of producing books?

you are way out of your depth here and i can't help you except to say, er, stop making proclamations about things you know nothing about. again, these 10-volume magnum opi don't appear in high-street book stores, because they are produced for and consumed by researchers.

if you don't see long works on 'time periods', that's merely because of a change of fashion/method in historiography, and 'time periods' are now out. but the multi-volume academic works of course are still being produced on a yearly basis.

Similarly I'm not so sure the now younger generation of newly tenured researchers and professors will subject their peers to the hurdle of publishing a 300+ page book before giving them acknowledgement, or if publishing multiple books will still be the norm. Perhaps we'll see eminent academics in the future that never did publish an entire book or only a couple at best. It's already the case in some more technical fields.

this is factually, and absolutely, incorrect. almost all junior researchers now are expected to have a book contract or the promise of a book in their early career. it is a significant early career hurdle for post-docs. competition is so fierce that anyone who isn't upselling their PhD thesis into a book contract is considerably behind. you do realize that a PhD thesis itself is potentially a 280-320 page book, right? christ how clueless are you! a 120,000 word doctoral thesis is a book-length piece of work!

Last edited by uziq (2020-07-03 04:18:31)

larssen, you are talking total shit.

a PhD thesis has chapters, yes, but they are not 'bundles of articles'. in any case, it is a book length piece of research. it is the very minimum barrier of qualification into academia: a sustained piece of research. so for you to say that academics will 'stop requiring that they write books' is tantamount to saying that they will stop requiring a PhD. unlikely, and in any case entirely undesirable.

a collection of articles is not 'very different' from a book at all. a huge number of academic books available in university libraries are precisely edited volumes/collections. if you are taking out a book on any topic, there's a good chance it will have chapter-length contributions by many different academics. a bundled collection of articles is a VERY COMMON type of academic book.

no surprises you haven't read it. you are ignorant and clueless. that's okay. multi-volume pieces of work are still regularly produced, or at least, as regularly as they ever were, considering they represent literally a life-achievement.

here is a recent one to be reviewed in the LRB, for example.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/a-cultura … 474288149/

Last edited by uziq (2020-07-03 04:32:22)

multi-volume works have always been the exception, dipshit. they are career-spanning efforts. you do realize when you go to a university library or study a course nowadays, you are looking at the sifted remains of 100s of years of research output, right? the vast majority of books fall out of print and become unavailable. no shit that the magisterial, career-defining multi-volume works tend to stick around longer. are you really this fucking dense?

a PhD is 100,000-150,000 words.

an average page of a typeset book will have 350 words per page (wpp) to 500 wpp on it, depending on whether you're producing a luxuriant edition with a new type and wide margins, or a paltry little edition with ant-writing. what's 125,000 divided by 400, larssen? every single fresh doctor graduating into the academic environment already has a book-length project waiting to be commissioned and sold/packaged to a publisher. so for you to claim that the academic practice of writing books is going to die out implies some very severe things about PhDs in general.

it's eye-opening and a little mindboggling how unawares you are.

sure, in maths or science subjects where the majority of work takes place in proofs. but you're talking about academic monographs in your own subjects, not computer coding or physics.

in any case, 120 pages, 320 pages, what's the difference? these are books, by any definition. academics produce BOOKS! things that are necessarily much longer, more detailed, more thoroughly researched than your 'nothing over 50 pages is of any worth' argument.

you're contorting pretty hard here. so because you don't like reading books, academic books must be rubbish! suspect! they'll be gotten rid of one day! what do you mean PhD's are basically books? well i'm sure one day they'll change PhDs too!

just admit that you don't read much and move on. christ almighty. taking down the entire edifice of academia to suit your ego seems a little extreme. academic books have a purpose and a point. move on!

Last edited by uziq (2020-07-03 04:56:45)

there is no other way you can cut this, larssen. a PhD itself, the very minimum qualification for an academic (and rightfully so), is already a much more substantial piece of research than a journal article. you claimed that nothing over a >50 page journal article is really of any worth. i don't know what to even say to you at this point. you want to convolute the entire of academia to suit your reading preferences. too bad.

the 'clash of civilizations' was a crossover non-fiction general history book, not an academic monograph. it is what you would call a polemic. it has nothing like the rigour of an academic monograph, nor even a PhD. it was published by simon & schuster, not an academic press, which is generally a good indicator ffs. are you going to claim that psychology textbooks are Bad next because jordan peterson's '12 rules for life'?

it's amazing how poorly and confusedly you are making this argument. 'journal articles are better than academic books because the clash of civilizations was a tendentious bestseller!'

Last edited by uziq (2020-07-03 05:10:56)

really it's amazing how much you've sounded like jay these last 2 pages.

'i have thought and pondered why i don't read many books. and i have concluded that books, in fact, are bad'.
'why would anyone buy print books anyway? pretentious intellectual posers'.
'academic books are useless because i have no need of them'.
'i much prefer the illusion of knowledge gained from reading a few handy summaries'.

Considering the idea started through a presentation at a think tank and it's often referenced in actual academic papers I'd say calling the assumption stupid is a bit of a stretch.

I still don't see how I'm wrong in not reading the 300 page book to glean knowledge of a subject. Wouldn't you agree it may also be more directly productive to dive into the academic discussion on the topic rather than the in depth proofs and arguments of a single author? In the time it takes you to consume the book you could read another 5 or 6 extensive reactions to it including the preceding or deduced paper.