I didn't hear much back from the coordinator and/or author and a few months later I received a free copy of the book. It was hardly any different from the draft I reviewed.
I've been contacted by them before and declined because I don't want to be associated with their brand, and I've proofread a friend's book that was published through them because he didn't trust their actual editors. They do have a process that's more than just "submit anything and we'll print it", but they're not very good at what they do (books are submitted in MS Word format!?).
I think they're mostly just riding the monetary coattails of fad tech topics, they don't care if their publishings are worthless because they just print so much volume that no single book will ever be popular enough that a bad one will gain much notice, and their topics are generally so niche or topic-of-the-month oriented that there will never be enough readers for an individual book to throw much of a fit over quality problems.
My main problem, and the reason I didn't finish the series was their advance was very low and the royalty rate was too. After looking round it seemed the rate was probably reasonable for authors in other fields, but very bad compared to what I would earn actually programming. Plus they absolutely refused to give me any indication of how many sales I could expect. I couldn't justify spending the time to complete the series vs regular contracting. I think this low remuneration affects the quality of the authors they are able to attract, so you're right in that part.
Browsing their books while choosing my free book made me realize they definitely have very open floodgates when it comes to publishing. I don't really consider flooding the market with books a problem though because I read books based on recommendation. If only a few gems come out as a result of their shotgun approach to publishing I think we are still all better off for it.
Additionally, something with Packt that you have to watch out for: Some of their titles conflict with each other. I.e. Along with the High Performance Postgres book, theres another book called Managing Postgresql, its not so great ircc.
I'm happy with the quality of my books, and I feel it was a great opportunity, but my next book I will goto a better publisher or self publish.
Also, my books are about gaming on the Raspberry Pi, which I feel is a very niche topic.
I am reading AngularJS Web App Dev Cookbook from packt and it's a pretty good read.
Needless to say negotiations didn't get very far.
To be honest that wasn't necessarily a red-line, but it was clear that their typesetting was fairly basic (their books at the time did look like Word docs - I've not looked at one in print for a while so I can't comment on current standards) and their ability to provide information about royalties was opaque to say the least. So my confidence wasn't with them.
But fair play to Packt, in a short space of time they've created a large collection of titles, particularly in niche areas which O'Reilly wouldn't touch. It's great that there is a publisher willing to invest in the IT textbook sector. I'm just hoping that things have improved as they've grown.
My biggest issue with them is that their tooling is poor, from using MS Word templates to having no version control process for documents and code.
I agree with other posters that the quality of the book will strongly depend on the writer.
var downloadurl = 'https://www.packtpub.com/ebook_download/'+getBookUrl.split('/')[2]+'/epub';
request(downloadurl)
.pipe(require('fs')
.createWriteStream('./books/book_'+getBookUrl.split('/')[2]+'.epub'));
Also, they seem to don't know you can use colours in ebooks. I see no excuse for not having syntax highlighting in a programming ebooks. It is just lousy management from their part.