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Shailesh Jain's avatar

Hi David,

I appreciate you sharing the aforementioned details with the wider community. I’d like to share a few points in response to your feedback:

Packt is not an academic publisher, but we do have good distribution reach into academic markets. We do not sell face-to-face to faculty in the way a traditional academic publisher does. For the data cleaning book, we did reach out to our academic contacts; however, the book unfortunately did not seem to fit their approach.

Your inputs and insights into production issues are largely valid and valuable to us. We will dig deeper and learn. Similarly, your analysis and views on a free community version of this book are valid too. As a publisher, we are considering our approach here. We would like to make a full eBook version of the data cleaning book available to the communities that you suggest; we can together learn about the value and impact of this approach.

Further, despite recruiting a technical reviewer within the month of contracting you as the author, we could not provide sufficient value to you as the reviewer eventually dropped out once chapters were shared with them. We are now much more heavily invested in building “co-development communities” around our books (primarily by hosting user-driven servers on Discord) and providing rich feedback/input to our authors in a timely manner.

From an overall perspective, we too are disappointed with the performance of this book. We as a team worked hard during all stages of publication, right from development to production to marketing (both professional and academic). Our goal was to maintain transparency with you, which we did. Despite our efforts, the book has not found an audience and does not seem to have a market user fit. Had we developed this book with you from the start, things might have been different.

Finally, the decision of whether to self-publish or not continues to be a challenging one. It depends on you as the author, your priorities, focus, and approach. We continue to invest in a rich and deep partnership with our authors and core tech. communities. In hindsight, self-publishing might have been the better choice for you and this book.

We wish you all the success in your publishing journey!

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