Thursday, May 27, 2010

How Facebook Privacy Settings Should Look



Of course they would never let you have this much easy control because it would defeat their business model of forcefully encouraging you to open up to everything.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Vanity Publishing Offers for Recent Grads: Some things to consider

If you are a recent grad you may be recieving unsolicited messages from so-called vanity publishing houses (LAP, etc) about publishing your undergrad or masters thesis. While it's not actually a scam, make no mistake that they are trying to profit off of you. It might actually be cool to have your thesis on Amazon and get a few free hardcover copies with whatever silly cover design you choose, but you should do some research and think carefully about the implications if you decide you want to try it out:

1) they are not editors, the paper will be published as-is including any
mistakes you don't catch (I would be very scared of unintentional plagiarism).

2)they will sell your work high ~100$, you cannot determine the price,

3) if someone actually buys it for that much, the royalties you recieve will be a very small portion of the cover price (how they make their profit),

4)you could run into obstacles if you ever want to publish the same material elsewhere in the future.

do some searching before you decide to take up an offer like this:

http://www.writingnetwork.edu.au/content/email-lap-offering-publish-my-masters-thesis

[update] here is an example of an LAP book on Amazon, selling for 67$:
http://www.amazon.com/Publishing-Translations-Social-Sciences-since/dp/3838351347/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274234454&sr=1-4