Re: Bringing out-of-print math books into print
- From: irvanellis <ianellis@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 17 Apr 2008 10:17:50 -0400
On Apr 15, 12:24 pm, tc...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On several occasions I have had the following experience. There is some
math book that I consult frequently enough that I decide it would be nice
to have a copy. The book is out of print. I search the web and find that
used copies are selling at exorbitant prices, or sometimes are not available
at all. I am sure that many others have had similar experiences.
On occasion I have tried to go further. I have contacted Dover Press or
the AMS to try to get them interested in bringing the book back into print.
Dover has always ignored me or filtered me out with a boilerplate response.
The AMS has been better, but is often at a loss to know whether it should
take the financial risk. An additional complication is that sometimes the
author of the book has unwittingly signed over the rights to the original
publisher, who does not want to relinquish the rights but also does not
want to bring the book back into print.
It occurs to me that one way to help address this problem would be to create
a website or Wiki where consumers of math books could "vote" for which books
they would like to see come back into print. Anyone could propose a book,
or add their support to a book that someone else has proposed. Although
imperfect, the website would be a useful source of information to publishers
such as the AMS that would be better than what they have now. (For example,
I recently tried to persuade them to reprint Dominic Welsh's "Matroid
Theory." Their only method of assessing demand was to ask a few experts
for their personal opinions. The experts said, without any supporting
evidence, that matroid theory is not very active, and that the existence of
Oxley's book means that nobody wants to buy Welsh's book. When I responded
with (1) statistics from MathSciNet showing that matroid theory is thriving;
(2) high prices for Welsh's book on bookfinder.com, demonstrating demand;
(3) quotes from Oxley's introduction, praising Welsh's book and saying that
Oxley's book did not supersede Welsh's; (4) the relatively high sales rank
of Lawler's matroid theory book, recently brought back into print by Dover;
they were surprised. It had not occurred to them to seek out such information
about the potential demand for the book.)
Unfortunately, I personally don't have the technical expertise to set up such
a website, but surely other readers of this newsgroup do. If you think this
is a good idea and are willing to set up at least a prototype website, then
please post the link to this newsgroup.
Tim Chow
--
Tim Chow tchow-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu
The range of our projectiles---even ... the artillery---however great, will
never exceed four of those miles of which as many thousand separate us from
the center of the earth. ---Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
Setting up a web site to elicit suggestions for bringing a work back
into print, and for accumulating data in support of doing so is a
useful, but probably not very effective step. The facts are: (1)
mathematics books, for typographical reasons in particular, are time-
consuming and difficult to prepare for print, and even with the best
OCR software available, would produce text of sometimes marginal
quality (take a look at some of the products in Kessinger Publishing's
Rare Reprints); (2) the mathematics book market is comparatively
limited (considering that even the AMS has to ask about the cost-
effectiveness of producing titles); and (3) it is uncertain how to
establish and maintain participation in a web site to recommend and
vote for the reprinting of titles, without enthusiastic support for
such a project, and, in any case, the data collected from such a web
site is likely to be essentially anecdotal and unconvincing to
publishers.
An alternative, or perhaps supplementary, route to creation of a
"want" list web site would be for those willing and able to
participate to put together something like the Gutenberg e-book
project. This would require a core of volunteers who would be willing
to check on the copyright status of proposed titles, to scan books
into an electronic data base, serve as proofreaders and editors to
ensure that the electronic texts produced were accurate in respect to
typography, etc., to organize the volunteers who would work on these
projects, to establish, organize, and maintain a host site for storage
and retrieval of the titles so produced. It seems that this kind of on-
going project would take a big commitment of time and work on the part
of organizers and volunteers, and perhaps the financial backing of
institutions and individuals to help acquire material for reprinting
and to finance a host computer and associated website and the
equipment, hardware and software, required to make the project
feasible.
Irving H. Anellis
.
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