The reduction of quality is most certainly not limited to self published books. I guess every English IT book I have bought(*) was published by what everybody would classify as highly respected publishing houses. These no longer need to spend resources on keeping the quality up, through editors and reviewers. The books sell anyway. One thing that one could mention to explain all the talkety-talk and lack of conciseness: The entry of the PC as a writing tool. When the authors were still using typewriters, doing editing was much more cumbersome; it required a lot more work to switch two sentences around, or move a paragraph to another chapter. The first thing that happened was that authors wrote down every thought they could think of, without filtering the way they did before. The second thing was that they forgot how to use the delete key, and how to do cut and paste to clean up the structure of the text. I guess that the cost of publishing, the process, makes up a larger fraction of the budget today. The cost of the paper is a smaller fraction than it used to be. Publishing/printing a 600 page book is not three times as expensive as a 200 page one. (Well it never was three times as expensive, but the cost of the materials made much more impact on the sales price 50 years ago.) (*) I have got one self-published IT book - Ted Nelson: Computer Lib/Dream Machines[^], the book introducing the concept of hypertext. It was published 49 years ago, before you had MS Word for writing your manuscript. Most of it is typewriter copy, or hand written. This is probably the first IT book I'd try to save if a fire broke out in my home.
