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From: nraoaoc@nmt.edu (Daniel Briggs)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: expensive TeX book
Message-ID: <1990Aug22.222115.936@nmt.edu>
Date: 22 Aug 90 22:21:15 GMT
References: <8164@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Reply-To: dbriggs@nrao.edu (Daniel Briggs)
Organization: National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Socorro NM
Lines: 33

In article <8164@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> dhosek@sif.claremont.edu writes:
>
>The book you've come across is essentially the conference
>proceedings from TeX88. Malcolm Clark, the editor is just as
>annoyed as the rest of us at the outrageous price (incidentally,
>I think it's *supposed* to be $70, but the higher price might be
>due to the drop in the value of the dollar).
>
>Will anyone buy the book? Maybe. After all, books of a similar
>nature have gone for similarly outrageously high prices (the 2nd
>European conference on TeX and Scientific Documentation had a
>proceedings volume around $50-some-odd bucks).

It is a sorry state of affairs all around guys, but these horror stories
aren't even that particularly horrible!  It gets considerable worse as
the conferences get more specialized.  For instance, any given astronomy
conference proceedings is typically $50 or $60.  That's for the reasonable
ones.  I went to a conference about a year ago where the editor did *not*
stipulate a price on the proceedings.  It was "Very Long Baseline
Interferometry, Techniques & Applications."  If it wasn't clear from the
title, it was intended to be the defining text book on VLBI for the 1990's,
(or at least the next five years or so).  The final price for the damned
thing turned out to be $110.  This just about puts it completely out of the
range of most students.  There were a lot of unhappy people about that one!

On a related note, someone said that "TeX does most of the editing for you."
It depends on the level of editing done, but if the editor is doing a
thorough job, NOT TRUE!  It can take several months of solid editing to do
a first rate job on a conference proceedings.
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