Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!murthy
From: murthy@algron.cs.cornell.edu (Chet Murthy)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: expensive TeX book
Message-ID: <44813@cornell.UUCP>
Date: 23 Aug 90 00:11:48 GMT
References: <8164@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> <1990Aug22.222115.936@nmt.edu>
Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept. Ithaca NY
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nraoaoc@nmt.edu (Daniel Briggs) writes:

>In article <8164@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> dhosek@sif.claremont.edu writes:
>>[stuff about an expensive TeX book]
>>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.

Oh - I didn't mean the job done by the editor of the proceedings.  I
meant the job done by the publisher.  And in any case, let's face it -
a lot of us would be willing to deal with a lot of ugliness (in the
form of ugly output, NOT in the form of errors) for the privilege of
having the book.

What I am suggesting is what happened with the BRA Logical Frameworks
proceedings, which were assembled (which took a lot of work on the
part of the editors) and then were distributed to all who wanted them
electronically.  It's a 500-page volume.

While it won't be as pretty as a publisher would make it, a publisher
cannot check for the correctness of the material.  And I will
sacrifice, as I said, a lot of beauty for a low price.

We printed it off here, and sometime I will get it bound (for $10-15
or so) and that will be that.  A nicely bound book, electronically
available source, and everybody is better off.

For small runs, it seems like the only logical choice.

--chet--