USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Print-on-demand Book Scams and Nigerian Universities

Of PODs, JITs, and Quality Control

I think the issue is quality control of the finished product, and not
the business model (self publication, production on demand, etc) on
which the production is based. If a book has something important to
say and is written, edited, designed, and manufactured very well--if
it is a pleasure to hold and read--most people would not care what
business model produced it.

Perhaps it should be pointed out that Publish on Demand (POD) is
merely an instance (in the literary domain) of Just in Time (JIT)
manufacturing in engineering. Dell's computer model would probably not
have succeeded as much as it did but for its foundation on JIT. When
using a JIT model, the businessman or woman does not need to have a
warehouse, nor is there a need to commit funds to estimating future
demand. If there is no demand, there is no manufacturing (of a
computer, or a book, or any manufactured product). In 1984, Michael
Dell was able to "customize" each computer because, using a JIT model,
no product was assembled until the customer placed the order. An
excellent computer can be "self-manufactured" just as an excellent
book can be "self-published."

An example of an excellent "self-published" book is _The Elements of
Style_ by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White. The book was written
while the first author was a professor at Cornell in 1918 for the use
of his students. Later, one of his former students (the second author)
collaborated with Strunk until Macmillan the commercial publisher got
involved.

Often, commercial publishers, being business men and women, are not
interested in committing capital to manufacturing a book unless it is
likely to sell in somewhat large numbers and thus make some profit.
Yet, one of the most important series of books, _Principia
Mathematica_ by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, could not
have been published by a commercially motivated house if judged by the
small number of offprints; it was published by the non-profit-driven
Cambridge University Press.

Donald Knuth could have become a "self-published" author because,
among other reasons, he was not sufficiently happy with the
inconsistent style of type, or fonts, used by the publisher in his
monumental work, _The Art of Computer Programming_. Instead, he made a
detour to study font design, wrote mathematical algorithms for
creating fonts and setting type, and came up with the book _Metafont_
in the process. This led to TeX, and its derivative, LaTeX
subsequently adopted by the American Mathematical Society for setting
mathematical text and now used world wide in scientific publishing.

So, the focus should be on the quality of the finished product and not
its pedigree.

On May 27, 1:02 am, "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooqkper...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Saturday, May 26, 2012  Print-on-demand Book Scams and Nigerian
> Universities<http://www.farooqkperogi.com/2012/05/print-on-demand-book-scams-and-n...>
>
>  *By Farooq A. Kperogi*
>
>  The other day, a friend of mine on Facebook proudly announced that his
> master's thesis had been published into a book by a German publishing
> company called Lambert Academic Publishing. Several people congratulated
> him. But I didn't. I knew he had been scammed—and that he would in turn
> unwittingly scam the Nigerian university system where he works as a
> lecturer.
>
>  Since reading his self-congratulatory post, I have heard of scores of
> other Nigerian university teachers who have published "academic books"
> through Lambert and other such Euro-American publishing companies. Before
> this trend becomes an epidemic, I thought I should call attention to an
> emerging, borderline fraudulent publishing model called "print on demand."
>
>  This is the way the model works. Author mills (that is, deceptive
> publishing houses that publish ANY work submitted to them) based in Europe
> and America use software to crawl the Internet (sometimes real people do
> the Web prowling) for any mention of "thesis" or "dissertation" on the
> Internet. The web crawler will identify the email addresses associated with
> the authors of the theses or dissertations and then send them an email
> using a standard email template that goes something like this:
>
>  "I am writing on behalf of an international publishing house, Lambert
> Academic Publishing.
>  In the course of a research on the … I came across a reference to your
> thesis on "...". We are an international publisher whose aim is to make
> academic research available to a wider audience.
>
>  LAP would be especially interested in publishing your dissertation in the
> form of a printed book.
>  Your reply including an e-mail address to which I can send an e-mail with
> further information in an attachment will be greatly appreciated. I am
> looking forward to hearing from you.
>
>  Kind regards,
>  Acquisition Editor
>  LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing AG & Co. KG
>  Saarbrücken
>  Dudweiler Landstraße 99, 66123 Saarbrücken Germany."
>
>  I have received many variations of this email template at least five times
> in the past few years. If a person agrees to publish his/her dissertation
> or thesis with the company, the company will request that the manuscript be
> sent to them via email. Within six weeks, the book will be "out." Of
> course, it will neither be peer-reviewed by experts in the field nor will
> it be proofread by a copy editor. So it comes out embarrassingly
> error-ridden. It's basically garbage in, garbage out. As an American who
> submitted his manuscript to Lambert put it in a blog
> post<http://utsavmaden.com.np/blog/2011/04/11/behind-lambert-academic-publ...>,
> "it is very evident that no one at the publication house bothered to do any
> editing. There are multiple grammatical errors."
>
> <http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LxR6ph1wFqo/T8Bbo-KsuEI/AAAAAAAABsw/RmrOqyh...>
>
>  In reality, the publishing house merely prepares a camera-ready copy of
> the manuscript, prints and mails a free author's copy of the book, and
> waits for orders. The company makes money when the author's friends and
> relations place an order for the book--or when the author purchases extra
> copies of the book to share with friends and family. Since they print only
> when an order is placed (thus the name "print on demand"), they lose
> nothing. I am told that authors from the Third World are required to pay
> for their author's copy.
>
>  The front- and back-page prototype of the book will be displayed on the
> publishing company's website and on Amazon.com—and that's it. You will
> never find the book in any bookstore or library. There is no media
> publicity for the book by the publisher, no advertising, no marketing, no
> distribution, and no critical reviews in academic or popular journals.
>
>  The author is promised royalties if the book sells a certain number of
> copies. Of course, no print-on-demand book sells enough copies for the
> author to earn any royalties.
>
> <http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-I9YNtPrT5Gc/T8BbxJZ1RmI/AAAAAAAABs4/vH_TH2W...>
>
>  Here is why Nigerian university administrators should be concerned about
> print-on-demand books. One, they do not go through any kind of review
> before they are published. In fact, many people have experimented with
> sending a farrago of mumbo jumbo to these publishing companies to see if
> they will be published. And, sure enough, they often get published. No
> manuscript sent to print-on-demand publishers is ever returned as
> unpublishable, however awfully it may have been written. As most people
> know, only peer-reviewed books can count toward promotion in academia.
>
>  Two, they have limited or no materiality. By this I mean that there are
> usually no more than a few copies of the "books" in circulation. That means
> they add nothing to the disciplinary conversations of their areas since
> they can't be found in libraries and bookstores. In other words, they are
> basically worthless.
>
>  Third, our people have been brainwashed into thinking that anything
> published in the West must be of high quality. People may innocently think
> Lambert is a legitimate academic press because it has a German address.
> Before you know it, many people will be promoted to professors based purely
> on fraudulent books they publish with the company, which American writer
> Victoria Strauss aptly called "an academic author
> mill"<http://www.webcitation.org/5nrn6wu3o>.
> That would be unfair to people who struggle against all odds to produce
> high-quality scholarship.
>
>  Many countries are waking up to the academic fraud that print-on-demand
> books are. The Australian Higher Education Research Data Collection
> (HERDC), for instance, has blacklisted books published by Lambert Academic
> Publishing <http://www.csu.edu.au/research/performance/herdc/criteria>. The
> Nigerian Universities Commission (NUC) has a responsibility to do the same.
>
>  *Related Articles:*
>  Bait-and-Switch Publishing: New Face of Academic
> Fraud<http://www.farooqkperogi.com/2011/08/bait-and-switch-publishing-new-f...>
>   Ndi Okereke's Fake Doctorate and
> Professorship<http://farooqkperogi.blogspot.com/2011/06/ndi-okereke-onyiukes-fake-d...>
> On Bauchi's Fake Lecturer--and What Should Be
> Done<http://farooqkperogi.blogspot.com/2011/05/on-bauchis-fake-lecturerand...>
> Intellectual 419: Philip Emeagwali and Gabriel Oyibo
> Compared<http://farooqkperogi.blogspot.com/2010/11/intellectual-419-philip-eme...>
> Andy Uba and the Epidemic of Fakery in
> Nigeria<http://farooqkperogi.blogspot.com/2011/05/on-bauchis-fake-lecturerand...>
>
> Personal website:www.farooqkperogi.com<http://www.farooqkperogi.blogspot.com>
> Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/farooqkperogi
> Twitter:https://twitter.com/#!/farooqkperogi
>
> "The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either
> proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

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