My wife and many friends are academics. They don&#x27;t exactly just type the thing up. Writing books for them is a painstaking process during which they sacrifice and put their blood, sweat, and tears into those pages.<p>I think this article is saying, there is a disingenuous motive on the part of the publisher. The article does not seem to imply that the authors are complicit by playing along and pumping out the academic equivalent to pulp-fiction.
When an academic puts their name on a published piece of work, it&#x27;s a serious thing. To accomplish something worth attaching one&#x27;s name to, it&#x27;s not economically feasible for the vast majority of academics to write pdf books pro-bono. Often their already barely making a livable salary and have their plates full. To expect them to write books for free is not at all reasonable.<p>I agree with the other commenter that this is indeed a good outcome. Paying academics to write these niche books is paying to build the modern Library of Alexandria. Walking through a top tier university&#x27;s library, one can&#x27;t help but be in awe of the wealth of knowledge being accumulated. And it has value. Some today. Some down the future. But it has value.<p>I myself have made use of several of these esoteric books, and could tell that they&#x27;d barely, if ever, been read. I couldn&#x27;t help but feel some gratitude toward the author for writing something so wonderful given it feeling like they&#x27;d written it for me and a few dozen other people. But then, others used the products I created based on that work. And so, in that sense, they wrote for those people too.