yeah, it's weirdly self-righteous, or at least self-important, behaviour.

I'm sorry for your loss.

Ooh, I like that

Oh, no, you do need those boots. I think I might also need them.

It's such a nice little thing to semi-accidentally hand-sell a book.

Define it; at least one reviewer will grump about it if you don't.

Solid choice. I just made myself a grilled cheese like I'm 12

have a wonderful summer, wise one!

Nearly all UPs (as opposed to scholarly presses generally, which include for-profits like Routledge) are working under incredible constraints and w/ shortfalls, as Ken Wissoker's excellent thread abt Duke made clear, but there are the "doing the best they can in spite of" ones and . . . the others.

Did I miss something (the latest iteration of that dumbass screed) or are we just doing general venting?

And the stupid cyclicality of it is exhausting (as you suggest, this is not fundamentally new backwardness). We just get a few decades of halting progress under our feet, and here come the eugenics and the reactionary gender ideologies and the environmental despoliation again . . . (here too, fwiw)

I can tell you that as a real live human copy editor for a journal, I take four passes over every piece I touch—two while I'm making suggested edits, two when author changes come back—and every genuine professional will be similarly committed to taking care with your work. AI won't.

Book acquisitions, I meant, sorry. Where I see this stuff used and talked about most is in or in relation to production, already an area where houses are forever looking to cut costs. (AI does not, of course, actually do that, as you point out.)

Yes, I was going to say. (As far as I know, no one is yet using this stuff in acquisitions, thankfully.) Still bad, though, and consistent with broader trends in UK publishing particularly.

Third-party for-profit companies that offer packaged book production services—sometimes just layout and printing, sometimes also including things like design and copy editing. Presses lean on them to varying degrees because they cut prod costs. They make up about 40% of the overall industry now.

(The other problem with them tends to be greater-than-average use of packagers, which are terrible from a labour perspective and also more likely than not to make absolute slop of your page proofs.)

These people are so deeply unserious that their unseriousness sort of defies processing

Yes, which is one reason the thread is great. (Somewhat similarly, it's Muse that makes Hopkins its money, in fact.) Faculty often have no idea of the complicated system of offsets that keep the whole rickety machine moving, and do not, in my experience, want to investigate on their own.