Finnucane

My desktop, which has an Asus motherboard but doesn't have Windows installed on it, also takes in the 3-4 seconds range for a hard shutdown. I would have assumed that it is entirely hardware-dependent and the OS hasn't much to do with it. On my Macbook Air I just counted 5 for a hard shutdown.

Peter Thiel helped fund his campaign.

Doesn't deserve respect.

"Argentina?"

I would quibble that Google does not meet his definition of 'publisher.' They were not making things public. They were connecting things already made public to potential readers of those things. That is more of a promotion and distribution function, a retail function.

These guys make the old-school vanity publishers look like paragons of virtue. At least with them, you'd end up a with a garage full of unsold books that you'd paid too much for. Even the Amazon sharecropping system is better. But yes, scammers have preyed on writers for as long as there have been writers. Today's technology allows it to be international and industrial in scale.

Then why do our corporate overlords continue to suck?

They're management consultants--how are you supposed to be able to tell if the work quality is reduced?

I went to the post office and they did it for $15, and gave it to me on a usb stick with hardcopy printouts.

Assuming that the result you get is reliable (I would not assume that), maybe that is enough. I had one book here where the author frequently repeated herself--sentences that basically said the same thing she'd just said in a previous paragraph. I had to cut all that. One with a lot of useless filler phrases that added nothing. Another where the author wrote whole paragraphs in the form of rhetorical questions. It was much better rephrased as statements. I did a lot of fact-checking on one book. Jargon that can be translated into English. Tables and charts where the data is not well organized. I mean, it goes on and on.

I work as a production editor for a uni press--mainly academics writing for other academics, not so much 'textbooks' in the sense of being mainly for student use in classrooms. I like to think the books are better after we work on them, but it is also true that schedules mean sometimes not as much as should be. Some of these guys cannot write their way out of a paper bag. One key difference between our market and the textbook market is that most of our books will stay in print for a long time without changes. A book like Data Science for Crime Analysis with Python may need to be updated frequently, a biography of a long-dead literary figure, no so much. Sales of such a book are probably less dependent on reviews and award notices. The more specialized your book is, the more frequently it needs to be revised, the more benefit there is to self-publishing.

But I would say, don't use AI for copyediting. Hire a pro with some topical knowledge.

Our old one still works fine. Nine years.

I remember when A Grand Day Out and Creature Comforts were being shown on the animation festival circuit. It seemed immediately apparent that something new and special had appeared.

Consumption choices matter, shopping is politics, don't stop complaining.

Or just say they would.