I wonder what percentage of that 54% have ever flown on an airline and more specifically since the TSA took over security?
Hard to decide whether to mod or post...
That's been my impression for quite a while now. If you fly with any regularity, the TSA looks like nothing more than security theater that just applies patch after patch every time someone is noticed to be trying to do something nefarious through one of their gaping security holes. I flew a lot both before and after sept 11, and have been either mid-trip or within a few days of a trip during a lot of the policy changes (e.g. only passengers past the security checkpoints, the 3 oz of fluid thing, underpants man, and more). They slap a patch on in reaction to an event, and while it looks like they're doing something, it really has no effect other than to increase cost and time involved, with no improvement in safety or security.
A while ago I came to the conclusion that all of this stuff is some sort of weird proxy for people's fear of flying. If we were really concerned about terrorists then public places would look a whole lot different than they do. The reason we don't have more terrorist attacks has nothing to do with all the TSA stuff and everything to do with there just not being very many terrorists.
The big news is that authors are getting paid when we loan an e-book to someone else. If this is true it's horrendous.
It's not true. At least not with Amazon. People are getting KDP Select "Units Borrowed" confused with units lent p2p. Authors and publishers don't even see that a book has been lent P2P, and it only happens once. Apparently a lot of people sign up for KDP select and don't know that there's a difference between p2p and KDP Library lending. They see a small royalty from the "units borrowed" column because everyone in KDP select splits a pot based on the total number of borrows for the month. KDP Select is a 3-month at a time exclusive deal with amazon where they can lend the books and they also have exclusive right to sell it for 3 months. The author/publisher gets some very small marketing perks.
Paid per book, per work, or per hour - whatever business model the REAL WORLD can handle... but they shouldn't be paid for future use of work they've already done. If they write a book in three months, they should write another one six months later, or a year, if they want to keep making a living as an author. Or if they do it for fun, because they WANT to write... well then they can just as well do it while working in wallmart to put food on the table.
Very few authors can turn out a good novel in 3-6 months. A lot of authors work for a decade or longer on their first novel, which is why second and third novels often are nowhere near as good. Plus nearly every author needs significant editing, even really good ones. It's no different than having engineering design reviews or code reviews. Harry Potter is a great example-- the first few books were pretty good, and enough to make it a best seller. The later books show fewer and fewer signs of editing, and got longer and longer, and were filled with more and more characters who were pulled out of nowhere to patch a plot hole and then left dangling. It's reasonable that authors should get paid more or less per reader, with some generous allowance for lending by individuals and libraries.
If you want authors to get paid per book up front, expect to see nothing but lowest common denominator stuff-- people are fickle about tastes and publishers have to take a lot of risks on stuff that isn't going to go anywhere, even without paying big advances.
Can you cite sources on the small percentage? Or define small? Looks like self-published authors can either choose a 35% or a 70% royalty. If they choose the former, they can exclude the book from the lending program. If they choose the latter, they cannot.
Is 35% small? Because this document (http://www.brandewyne.com/writingtips/authorspaid.html) implies that standard rates from publishers top out around 15% and average significantly less. Plus, of course, many of these authors would never land a mainstream publisher and would be limited to vanity press, which is pretty much a loss.
As far as I can tell from looking through KDP royalty statements, there's no royalty if the original purchaser uses the lending feature to let someone borrow an ebook.
If you choose the 70% royalty, the book is lending enabled, meaning that a person can lend it out once for two weeks. If you choose 35% you can opt out of that. People may see the "Units Borrowed" column and not read the footnote carefully and think that they get a royalty from units lent p2p.
The amazon lending policy is still much more restrictive than that of a dead-tree book, and is designed mainly to give people a sample of a book to encourage them to buy their own copy. For a reasonably long book and a busy person, you might not get around to sitting down and reading it all at once, and the two weeks could easily expire before you finish. And even if you finish it and like it, it provides another person to recommend it by word of mouth (and who can't lend it).
Amazon sales reports do have a "units borrowed" column, but that's for books that are enrolled in KDP Select, which gives Amazon exclusive sales rights to your book for 3 months, and includes it in their lending library (available to Amazon Prime subscribers). The royalty for that comes from a combined pool of money from amazon prime fees that is divided among all the KDP library loan instances. We don't have much in KDP select, so I haven't looked close, but it looks like if there are a lot of books borrowed you get less (smaller cut of the same pool).
Standard rates from publishers end up being around 15-20% of cover price, and if you got an advance you generally have to recoup like in the record industry.
Don't bother suing, just switch. I wrote him a post suggesting hosting outside the US. I'm a small electronic book publisher and don't have any problem at all with what they're doing. Word of mouth is more effective than advertising for little publishers. I use a canadian hosting company in part because they had a TOS that was about a page and didn't say "We offer unlimited storage and bandwidth unless you actually use it". I've had reasonably sized and priced and ever increasing limits since I signed up with them.
These are trade jobs - and for a lot of university bound students, they may be better off doing a trade than getting a university degree and debt. Depending on the trade, you can make quite a bit of money at it as well.
Considering a warehouse fulfillment job is a no/low-skill job, being able to get trade education is extremely valuable. I'm sure Amazon would allow you to learn to be an electrician, plumber, as well.
And many of those trade jobs are hard to offshore. Electrician can be a pretty decent job, and it's always hard to get good machinists and tool makers.
I can install pretty much anything that's available for *nix on my mac, and those things generally install with minimal hassle. And I get the OS X front end when I want it, and I can run most Windows-only things (including stuff that uses external data acq hardware) using Parallels. All in an easily carried and reasonably tough laptop. The optical drives do tend to die young though-- I think I've had to replace the optical drive in most of the powerbooks/macbooks that I've had over the years, as well as for a few other people.
but if they are desperate, the technology can be built from scratch.
It should be easy to do with just a regular scanner and some image processing software. There's probably even an iphone app for it already that just uses the camera...
Its current incarnation is more like the short lived "Spy" magazine for well off literate people. The current editor was an editor (and one of the founders of?) Spy about a million years ago, and it shows. If you're a geek and want to maintain some contact to popular culture it's not a bad way to catch up once a month.
I sometimes like to point out to people that I was never able to outtype Magic Window on an old 1 MHz Apple II+. I think I have managed to outtype every word processor I've used since then at least occasionally. Computers get faster fast, but the software often gets slower, faster.
My grandfather, a Dutch electrical engineer who was responsible for setting up most of the electrical and gas infrastructure in North-Holland shortly before and after WWII,...
Sure, the up-front cost of burying all of the electrical lines in Europe from the get-go was expensive, but everybody realized that it would soon pay off.
Much of Europe had to start from scratch after the war, so burying the lines was something that could be done alongside a lot of other construction. The US has had its infrastructure grow steadily (and often haphazardly) without the resetting effect of having large swaths severely damaged or destroyed at the level of WWII. To go back and bury power lines in areas that are already fully developed is much more expensive than during new construction or reconstruction. A great deal of new construction in the US does have buried lines. But as noted elsewhere in the responses here, buried lines come with their own sets of problems and difficulties of repair.
It's sad that my internet service is more reliable than my electricity. If it's so expensive to bury wires, how come Verizon just did it a couple years ago when they installed FiOS?
When we had the big power outages in northern LA county in december of last year, the phone and cable companies kept their signals going by dropping generators all over the place. Going out for a bike ride while the power was out, I passed a couple of phone company boxes that had generators next to them, and saw cable company trucks parked here and there with extension cords reaching up into their boxes that were low down on the poles. If you look at the trucks driving around (even when power is fine) a lot of them have gasoline powered generators strapped on them.
Power around here is flaky not because it's above ground, but because it's old and poorly maintained, and a lot of it is close to being overloaded on a normal day. We've had the same upstream transformer blow a number of times in the past few years, a couple times it was within a week of its previous replacement. They don't seem to try to figure out why it's going, or reduce the load. They just replace the broken bit over and over. We lose power pretty regularly for no apparent reason.
In principle it wasn't a government granted monopoly- people were supposed to be able to buy their power from whoever they wanted and have it delivered over SCE's lines. The unregulated market drove prices through the roof (helped by artificial scarcities created by the private power companies). The municipal power companies all had long term contracts in place (that they could get as large buyers, and that individuals couldn't get) plus some of their own generating capacity.
When power was deregulated in CA (the Enron period...) the private power systems like SCE had incredibly high prices and brownouts. The municipal power systems had stable prices and power. Pasadena was rock steady, and City of LA DPW actually made a profit for the city while keeping power up for people far better than SCE.
During the last major windstorm/power outage, the municipal power systems were better maintaned and repaired faster. SCE was a disaster.
We had a windstorm (gusts probably over 130 mph in areas) last December that took down hundreds of trees within a few miles of me, and probably thousands all over SoCal, including a number of quite large trees. It also took down a lot of power poles without tree impact. People I know who have solar didn't lose any panels-- they're generally tied to the roof pretty well, and won't have trees above them that would cause impact. I'm planning to put in a small solar setup to run the fridge (I don't have enough view of the sky to go full solar).
It seems like the biggest correlation for damage was: native trees (around here, Live Oak) generally held up pretty well. I have a bunch of oaks plus an ~80 foot tall pine tree that's got a trunk about 3 feet across and sways a lot. We lost pretty much nothing except leaves and twigs. Planted trees (including many very large mature ones along roadways) fell like dominoes because they didn't develop root systems appropriate to the area. There were roads that had two trees across them per block.
As far as power reliability-- the municipal power systems had been doing a better job of doing maintenance and prep than SCE-- Pasadena had nearly everyone back up very quickly, and City of LA lost about the same number of customers as SCE, but had them back up about twice as fast. Their area is pretty well comparable and interspersed with SCE's coverage area.
I have a bunch of oak trees on a pretty small lot, including one that has power lines running through it. When we had the last wind storm, it was about 6 months after we'd had them all trimmed (and nicely), and had a tree that had abruptly died removed. Our total loss of branches was a piece about the size of a small shrub, maybe 2 feet across. There were hundreds of downed trees in the area, and even more that lost branches. Keeping them trimmed saved us an enormous mess. Our tree trimmer came by a few days after the wind with a big smile and said something like "See, I told you I'd do a nice job".
Black Plague is rare, but still happens you just usually don't hear about it because it's treatable with antibiotics and preventable by controlling rodent populations
I live on the edge of a national forest at the "urban/forest interface". Every once in a while there will be a report of Y. Pestis (aka "The Plague") in squirrels or something in the park nearby (it's a nature center that leads into the forest). I don't recall any cases where it was transmitted to people. Even if it were relatively common, there are far more dangerous things in the forest, even right here at the developed edge. Most Saturdays in the summer seem to bring a lot of helicopter traffic over the house, as the sheriffs fly back and forth plucking people off of a dangerous climb that leads to the second of many small waterfalls. A couple people died there last year, and already this month I think there have been two major falls of ~150+ feet. Both survived, but with pretty serious injuries. Plague is a lot easier to deal with.
Almost all of the cost is in R&D, physical production is probably a rounding error on a typical NASA project.
Not really R&D so much as test, qualification, and documentation. Everything gets tested (generally test units that don't fly) to show that it will do what it's supposed to in the environment that it's supposed to for as long as it's supposed to. It's lots of environmental and life testing, plus redesign and retest when things fail. And because you're building only one, or maybe 2, you don't get to spread those costs over a hundred thousand or a few million units like you do with a car or an iphone. When you can't go fix it, you test everything as much as possible to make sure it will work. And things still fail, because there's always some bad luck or an unexpected environment, or the test didn't replicate the environment the way it was supposed to.
And the mision had already suffered a 2 year delay to fix other problems. You don't just end up with hardware that's been sitting on the shelf a long time, you have a marching army of people that you have to pay to maintain for those 2 years. You can reduce the headcount, but you still have to keep quite a few key people around-- if you let them go work on other projects you can't easily get them back.
I've heard this as well from someone who has written a textbook. Many places don't allow them to collect royalties for copies sold on their own campus, not just for their own classes. And the pay that they get is close to nothing. My friend got a very small advance relative to the amount of work it was, and then had to pay her own copy editor because the publishing house offshored the editing and they introduced huge numbers of errors.
In 4 years of undergrad and 6 years of grad school at major universities, I never once had a class where the professor wrote the textbook. I did use a textbook as an undergrad that was written by one of the faculty where I went to grad school. He did use it for his class when he taught it, but not all of the faculty who taught the same class did. It was quite a good book and not particularly expensive, and wasn't regularly revised just to have new problems sets-- it was a senior level quantum mechanics text.
In some cases (not sure how many) faculty don't get royalties on copies of their books that are sold on their own campus in order to prevent this sort of thing.
TFA says they're at ITT in Rochester, formerly a Kodak facility. The same facility that built the Hubble spare that's sitting (untested, as the Kodak guys like to remind you) in the Smithsonian.
PG largely fails the zOMG MUST BE AUTHENTICEST!! test; but produces fairly high quality results because only people who care are involved.
Not just people who care, but many of them who all actually read the thing. For a lot of cut rate stuff it's likely that not more than one person read it before it was put up for sale. In some cases scans are done by people who don't even speak the language that's being scanned and might just be comparing samples character by character (or not). I'm reading Annapurna by Maurice Herzog right now, and it's clear that it was a scan and not carefully read. Many of the lowercase "e"s got turned into "c"s by the OCR. A single readthrough by a single reader of english would have caught them. Even a pass by a spellchecker should have gotten most of them!
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I wonder what percentage of that 54% have ever flown on an airline and more specifically since the TSA took over security?
Hard to decide whether to mod or post...
That's been my impression for quite a while now. If you fly with any regularity, the TSA looks like nothing more than security theater that just applies patch after patch every time someone is noticed to be trying to do something nefarious through one of their gaping security holes. I flew a lot both before and after sept 11, and have been either mid-trip or within a few days of a trip during a lot of the policy changes (e.g. only passengers past the security checkpoints, the 3 oz of fluid thing, underpants man, and more). They slap a patch on in reaction to an event, and while it looks like they're doing something, it really has no effect other than to increase cost and time involved, with no improvement in safety or security.
A while ago I came to the conclusion that all of this stuff is some sort of weird proxy for people's fear of flying. If we were really concerned about terrorists then public places would look a whole lot different than they do. The reason we don't have more terrorist attacks has nothing to do with all the TSA stuff and everything to do with there just not being very many terrorists.
The big news is that authors are getting paid when we loan an e-book to someone else. If this is true it's horrendous.
It's not true. At least not with Amazon. People are getting KDP Select "Units Borrowed" confused with units lent p2p. Authors and publishers don't even see that a book has been lent P2P, and it only happens once. Apparently a lot of people sign up for KDP select and don't know that there's a difference between p2p and KDP Library lending. They see a small royalty from the "units borrowed" column because everyone in KDP select splits a pot based on the total number of borrows for the month. KDP Select is a 3-month at a time exclusive deal with amazon where they can lend the books and they also have exclusive right to sell it for 3 months. The author/publisher gets some very small marketing perks.
Paid per book, per work, or per hour - whatever business model the REAL WORLD can handle... but they shouldn't be paid for future use of work they've already done. If they write a book in three months, they should write another one six months later, or a year, if they want to keep making a living as an author. Or if they do it for fun, because they WANT to write... well then they can just as well do it while working in wallmart to put food on the table.
Very few authors can turn out a good novel in 3-6 months. A lot of authors work for a decade or longer on their first novel, which is why second and third novels often are nowhere near as good. Plus nearly every author needs significant editing, even really good ones. It's no different than having engineering design reviews or code reviews. Harry Potter is a great example-- the first few books were pretty good, and enough to make it a best seller. The later books show fewer and fewer signs of editing, and got longer and longer, and were filled with more and more characters who were pulled out of nowhere to patch a plot hole and then left dangling. It's reasonable that authors should get paid more or less per reader, with some generous allowance for lending by individuals and libraries.
If you want authors to get paid per book up front, expect to see nothing but lowest common denominator stuff-- people are fickle about tastes and publishers have to take a lot of risks on stuff that isn't going to go anywhere, even without paying big advances.
Can you cite sources on the small percentage? Or define small? Looks like self-published authors can either choose a 35% or a 70% royalty. If they choose the former, they can exclude the book from the lending program. If they choose the latter, they cannot.
Is 35% small? Because this document (http://www.brandewyne.com/writingtips/authorspaid.html) implies that standard rates from publishers top out around 15% and average significantly less. Plus, of course, many of these authors would never land a mainstream publisher and would be limited to vanity press, which is pretty much a loss.
As far as I can tell from looking through KDP royalty statements, there's no royalty if the original purchaser uses the lending feature to let someone borrow an ebook.
If you choose the 70% royalty, the book is lending enabled, meaning that a person can lend it out once for two weeks. If you choose 35% you can opt out of that. People may see the "Units Borrowed" column and not read the footnote carefully and think that they get a royalty from units lent p2p.
The amazon lending policy is still much more restrictive than that of a dead-tree book, and is designed mainly to give people a sample of a book to encourage them to buy their own copy. For a reasonably long book and a busy person, you might not get around to sitting down and reading it all at once, and the two weeks could easily expire before you finish. And even if you finish it and like it, it provides another person to recommend it by word of mouth (and who can't lend it).
Amazon sales reports do have a "units borrowed" column, but that's for books that are enrolled in KDP Select, which gives Amazon exclusive sales rights to your book for 3 months, and includes it in their lending library (available to Amazon Prime subscribers). The royalty for that comes from a combined pool of money from amazon prime fees that is divided among all the KDP library loan instances. We don't have much in KDP select, so I haven't looked close, but it looks like if there are a lot of books borrowed you get less (smaller cut of the same pool).
Standard rates from publishers end up being around 15-20% of cover price, and if you got an advance you generally have to recoup like in the record industry.
Don't bother suing, just switch. I wrote him a post suggesting hosting outside the US. I'm a small electronic book publisher and don't have any problem at all with what they're doing. Word of mouth is more effective than advertising for little publishers. I use a canadian hosting company in part because they had a TOS that was about a page and didn't say "We offer unlimited storage and bandwidth unless you actually use it". I've had reasonably sized and priced and ever increasing limits since I signed up with them.
These are trade jobs - and for a lot of university bound students, they may be better off doing a trade than getting a university degree and debt. Depending on the trade, you can make quite a bit of money at it as well.
Considering a warehouse fulfillment job is a no/low-skill job, being able to get trade education is extremely valuable. I'm sure Amazon would allow you to learn to be an electrician, plumber, as well.
And many of those trade jobs are hard to offshore. Electrician can be a pretty decent job, and it's always hard to get good machinists and tool makers.
But think of the amount of popcorn they could produce in remote locations...
I can install pretty much anything that's available for *nix on my mac, and those things generally install with minimal hassle. And I get the OS X front end when I want it, and I can run most Windows-only things (including stuff that uses external data acq hardware) using Parallels. All in an easily carried and reasonably tough laptop. The optical drives do tend to die young though-- I think I've had to replace the optical drive in most of the powerbooks/macbooks that I've had over the years, as well as for a few other people.
but if they are desperate, the technology can be built from scratch.
It should be easy to do with just a regular scanner and some image processing software. There's probably even an iphone app for it already that just uses the camera...
Its current incarnation is more like the short lived "Spy" magazine for well off literate people. The current editor was an editor (and one of the founders of?) Spy about a million years ago, and it shows. If you're a geek and want to maintain some contact to popular culture it's not a bad way to catch up once a month.
I sometimes like to point out to people that I was never able to outtype Magic Window on an old 1 MHz Apple II+. I think I have managed to outtype every word processor I've used since then at least occasionally. Computers get faster fast, but the software often gets slower, faster.
My grandfather, a Dutch electrical engineer who was responsible for setting up most of the electrical and gas infrastructure in North-Holland shortly before and after WWII, ...
Sure, the up-front cost of burying all of the electrical lines in Europe from the get-go was expensive, but everybody realized that it would soon pay off.
Much of Europe had to start from scratch after the war, so burying the lines was something that could be done alongside a lot of other construction. The US has had its infrastructure grow steadily (and often haphazardly) without the resetting effect of having large swaths severely damaged or destroyed at the level of WWII. To go back and bury power lines in areas that are already fully developed is much more expensive than during new construction or reconstruction. A great deal of new construction in the US does have buried lines. But as noted elsewhere in the responses here, buried lines come with their own sets of problems and difficulties of repair.
It's sad that my internet service is more reliable than my electricity. If it's so expensive to bury wires, how come Verizon just did it a couple years ago when they installed FiOS?
When we had the big power outages in northern LA county in december of last year, the phone and cable companies kept their signals going by dropping generators all over the place. Going out for a bike ride while the power was out, I passed a couple of phone company boxes that had generators next to them, and saw cable company trucks parked here and there with extension cords reaching up into their boxes that were low down on the poles. If you look at the trucks driving around (even when power is fine) a lot of them have gasoline powered generators strapped on them.
Power around here is flaky not because it's above ground, but because it's old and poorly maintained, and a lot of it is close to being overloaded on a normal day. We've had the same upstream transformer blow a number of times in the past few years, a couple times it was within a week of its previous replacement. They don't seem to try to figure out why it's going, or reduce the load. They just replace the broken bit over and over. We lose power pretty regularly for no apparent reason.
In principle it wasn't a government granted monopoly- people were supposed to be able to buy their power from whoever they wanted and have it delivered over SCE's lines. The unregulated market drove prices through the roof (helped by artificial scarcities created by the private power companies). The municipal power companies all had long term contracts in place (that they could get as large buyers, and that individuals couldn't get) plus some of their own generating capacity.
When power was deregulated in CA (the Enron period...) the private power systems like SCE had incredibly high prices and brownouts. The municipal power systems had stable prices and power. Pasadena was rock steady, and City of LA DPW actually made a profit for the city while keeping power up for people far better than SCE.
During the last major windstorm/power outage, the municipal power systems were better maintaned and repaired faster. SCE was a disaster.
We had a windstorm (gusts probably over 130 mph in areas) last December that took down hundreds of trees within a few miles of me, and probably thousands all over SoCal, including a number of quite large trees. It also took down a lot of power poles without tree impact. People I know who have solar didn't lose any panels-- they're generally tied to the roof pretty well, and won't have trees above them that would cause impact. I'm planning to put in a small solar setup to run the fridge (I don't have enough view of the sky to go full solar).
It seems like the biggest correlation for damage was: native trees (around here, Live Oak) generally held up pretty well. I have a bunch of oaks plus an ~80 foot tall pine tree that's got a trunk about 3 feet across and sways a lot. We lost pretty much nothing except leaves and twigs. Planted trees (including many very large mature ones along roadways) fell like dominoes because they didn't develop root systems appropriate to the area. There were roads that had two trees across them per block.
As far as power reliability-- the municipal power systems had been doing a better job of doing maintenance and prep than SCE-- Pasadena had nearly everyone back up very quickly, and City of LA lost about the same number of customers as SCE, but had them back up about twice as fast. Their area is pretty well comparable and interspersed with SCE's coverage area.
I have a bunch of oak trees on a pretty small lot, including one that has power lines running through it. When we had the last wind storm, it was about 6 months after we'd had them all trimmed (and nicely), and had a tree that had abruptly died removed. Our total loss of branches was a piece about the size of a small shrub, maybe 2 feet across. There were hundreds of downed trees in the area, and even more that lost branches. Keeping them trimmed saved us an enormous mess. Our tree trimmer came by a few days after the wind with a big smile and said something like "See, I told you I'd do a nice job".
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me? --Don Van Vliet (May he rest in peace)
awesome sig-- one of my favorite lines ever.
Many libraries are also lending e-books now, and the aggregators for that are capable of tracking your reading habits.
Black Plague is rare, but still happens you just usually don't hear about it because it's treatable with antibiotics and preventable by controlling rodent populations
I live on the edge of a national forest at the "urban/forest interface". Every once in a while there will be a report of Y. Pestis (aka "The Plague") in squirrels or something in the park nearby (it's a nature center that leads into the forest). I don't recall any cases where it was transmitted to people. Even if it were relatively common, there are far more dangerous things in the forest, even right here at the developed edge. Most Saturdays in the summer seem to bring a lot of helicopter traffic over the house, as the sheriffs fly back and forth plucking people off of a dangerous climb that leads to the second of many small waterfalls. A couple people died there last year, and already this month I think there have been two major falls of ~150+ feet. Both survived, but with pretty serious injuries. Plague is a lot easier to deal with.
Almost all of the cost is in R&D, physical production is probably a rounding error on a typical NASA project.
Not really R&D so much as test, qualification, and documentation. Everything gets tested (generally test units that don't fly) to show that it will do what it's supposed to in the environment that it's supposed to for as long as it's supposed to. It's lots of environmental and life testing, plus redesign and retest when things fail. And because you're building only one, or maybe 2, you don't get to spread those costs over a hundred thousand or a few million units like you do with a car or an iphone. When you can't go fix it, you test everything as much as possible to make sure it will work. And things still fail, because there's always some bad luck or an unexpected environment, or the test didn't replicate the environment the way it was supposed to.
And the mision had already suffered a 2 year delay to fix other problems. You don't just end up with hardware that's been sitting on the shelf a long time, you have a marching army of people that you have to pay to maintain for those 2 years. You can reduce the headcount, but you still have to keep quite a few key people around-- if you let them go work on other projects you can't easily get them back.
I've heard this as well from someone who has written a textbook. Many places don't allow them to collect royalties for copies sold on their own campus, not just for their own classes. And the pay that they get is close to nothing. My friend got a very small advance relative to the amount of work it was, and then had to pay her own copy editor because the publishing house offshored the editing and they introduced huge numbers of errors.
In 4 years of undergrad and 6 years of grad school at major universities, I never once had a class where the professor wrote the textbook. I did use a textbook as an undergrad that was written by one of the faculty where I went to grad school. He did use it for his class when he taught it, but not all of the faculty who taught the same class did. It was quite a good book and not particularly expensive, and wasn't regularly revised just to have new problems sets-- it was a senior level quantum mechanics text.
In some cases (not sure how many) faculty don't get royalties on copies of their books that are sold on their own campus in order to prevent this sort of thing.
TFA says they're at ITT in Rochester, formerly a Kodak facility. The same facility that built the Hubble spare that's sitting (untested, as the Kodak guys like to remind you) in the Smithsonian.
PG largely fails the zOMG MUST BE AUTHENTICEST!! test; but produces fairly high quality results because only people who care are involved.
Not just people who care, but many of them who all actually read the thing. For a lot of cut rate stuff it's likely that not more than one person read it before it was put up for sale. In some cases scans are done by people who don't even speak the language that's being scanned and might just be comparing samples character by character (or not). I'm reading Annapurna by Maurice Herzog right now, and it's clear that it was a scan and not carefully read. Many of the lowercase "e"s got turned into "c"s by the OCR. A single readthrough by a single reader of english would have caught them. Even a pass by a spellchecker should have gotten most of them!