The Craig Effron

Welcome to The Craig Effron page about books and general advice on books. There are few sites dedicated to the book advice category so we will be having one here. mouthshut.com has some content on people's advice on books - in general. Here goes:

I was looking at some of the new arrivals in our Institute,There was some books of very interesting topics like Spirituality in workplace,Strategic HRM,Emotional intelligence,Datamining ,E-business etc allof them are published by ICFAI. I browsed through them .I could hardly find anything intersting! They look like highly specialized book, But they could not not give you anything more than what a dictionary or an yearbook can give! .

But how can you make such 300-500 page book with such a small info.?. Wondering how they can do business with such a low quality I made some research. and I found out that most of the books are nothing but loosely edited books with contribution from various author.Most of them repeat the same thing.(things with are easy) and leave out the difficult thing.You never get the full details about the topic. So it will be very boring to read the book.For example Spirituality in workplace is about same yoga,meditation,relaxation stuffs in all pages.
So it is only Quantity,not quality.

So if the books are so useless,How can they survive in the market, ...Simple business strategy,.
since they position themselves as specialised academic books, they target corporate buyers like libraries .They create lot of hype by creating seminars by inviting big people,,roadshows etc,etc. Catchy titles too attract gullible readers.

But when nothing else work they havew another way, they have chain of education institution which sell BBA,MBA,CFA,DBA and has Institute for vendors,retailers, accountants,teachers and what not! They make these book a standard reference for those courses.Most of their question papers have answers in these books only. And I see magazines here like E-business,Marketing Mastermind,advertising experts...They are the clones of Mags like A and M, Business world etc.cheap imitation at higher prices! There is a qurterly Agriculture economics Journal whose front page look like the well know "Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics" . So much for business ethics of ICFAI University press, I beleive it is pure plagiarism.

That may be a wrong thing to say that all books of a publisher is bad. However i have left with no option but to say so. Mainly because govt and schoool & college libraries should not waste their resources on such books.