"Read 2000 lines (50 pages or so) from a book in an afternoon? Sounds like a wonderful and relaxing day."

Sure, because you're not checking it for errors. 50 pages of copyediting an academic book about economic history? Not a relaxing day.

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.

I imagine that's what the horse riders said about "driving" for the people using horseless carriages.

Please don't let this become an "us versus them" ideology.

Progress is always uncomfortable for some people. Jobs and skills have always been displaced by advancements in technology.

Nothing about your post indicates you deserve any respect. Slop comment which adds nothing to the conversation. Probably AI.

"Argentina?"

I guess Peter Thiel already has a compound there but I'm not sure if they would all get along.

The argentina time share might actually be available while thiel spends time in the $130m bel air mansion he bought last month.

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.

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

With all the jokes about consultants, they actually do quite important work and don't just create powerpoints or layoffs like people thing.

Then why do our corporate overlords continue to suck?

Mostly because they're driven by profit at all costs, which is often the downfall of a lot of things.

However I can't make any sort of judgement on such a generalised basis

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

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.

I am maybe not using copy-editing the way you are (feel free to correct me what is more typical in the field). My prompt is not much different than "review the text for minor grammar and spelling errors, and list the corrections you would suggest". I accept the large majority of the suggestions.

For technical review of the content, I just send it out to other experts.

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 know what you mean by "cannot write out of a paper bag". Agree AI won't help those folks (I honestly don't know how anyone has enough patience to help them).

My above prompt does indeed work well for me, but agree would likely not catch those example errors you list.