I view them as below free-tier content that you a) have to pay for, but since there is basically zero quality control, they're often out of date, full of errors or just either incredibly specific (here's one specific example of a thing) or copy-pasted API documentation.
I mean, just seeing packt as a publisher is enough for me to go: I'm not really interested in this.
You can make good content and publish it without packt (eg. the FastAI book).
If this book is actually good, why did you involve packt? They're the enemy of high quality technical documentation.
Author here. I agree with what you said. I wrote my first book with Packt back when I was a student and was like: "cool, a book deal!" Of course, I didn't know about the caveats :P. Yeah, there was very low (/no) quality control. In fact, they introduced a lot of typos during the layouting (apparently, they re-typed the equations by hand!).
However, despite all of that, the book was quite successful, so for the subsequent editions, they gave my book much more attention. Personally, I also got much more flexibility regarding deadlines, etc.
Long story short, yeah, there are definitely issues with quality control, and it's really up to the author to make sure that the content is correct and sound. For this particular book, I must say that I worked with a great layouter who paid a lot of attention to detail this time. Also, with their new layout, they no longer had to re-type the equations, and the typesetting looks so much better now. I am pretty happy with how it turned out this time :)
One thing I noticed a couple of times now is that they just blatantly copy other publishers bestseller titles, probably in the hope of people buying their books accidentally after reading a title recommendation.
Example:
Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and Tensorflow, O'Reilly, 2017
Hands-On Machine Learning with scikit-learn and Scientific Python Toolkits, Packt, 2020
Really makes me want to filter them out as spam on Amazon etc.
I made the mistake of buying one once. It was basically the repacked language documentation without adding anything of value. If they would publish that, the will publish anything.
Yes, they aren't that bad. I think your right about them being lower quality than others, but I've seen some good ones. I think an earlier version of this Python ML book was quite good, I remember reading some of it and being happy with it.
I view them as below free-tier content that you a) have to pay for, but since there is basically zero quality control, they're often out of date, full of errors or just either incredibly specific (here's one specific example of a thing) or copy-pasted API documentation.
I mean, just seeing packt as a publisher is enough for me to go: I'm not really interested in this.
You can make good content and publish it without packt (eg. the FastAI book).
If this book is actually good, why did you involve packt? They're the enemy of high quality technical documentation.