Science and Technology news... :: View topic - Out-of-print math books: An Update

herbzet · Guest

Ben Pfaff wrote:

[quote]"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
--D. E. Knuth, "Structured Programming with go to Statements"
[/quote]
Yeah, my girlfriend says that, too.

--
hz

Bill Dubuque · Guest

tchow@lsa.umich.edu wrote:
[quote]Bill Dubuque <wgd@nestle.csail.mit.edu> wrote:

So, seriously, why do you prefer paper media, which lack all these
capabilities and many more?

While I don>t consider myself a partisan of either side, the main advantage
I see of paper media is that it is much more likely to last 500 years once
it>s on the shelf, even if nobody is interested in it.
[/quote]
My experience is the opposite. As I mentioned here, some recently
purchased Springer books fell apart quite quickly. Otoh, I>ve
used electronic texts without problems over 3 decades.

[quote]In an ideal world, all electronic documents are upgraded whenever the de
factor standard format changes. In the real world, only the high-priority
items get this treatment.
[/quote]
I>ve accumulated many thousands of electronic texts over 3 decades
and I>ve never encountered any major problems. What format did you
have problems with?

[quote]The other reason, in the current context, for pursuing paper publication is
that I can get the results much sooner. Assuming all goes well, I should
have a new copy of Welsh>s book by next summer. The infrastructure for
electronic books isn>t in place yet for that. This may change in the future,
of course, but it>s the reality today, and I want the book as quickly and
cheaply as possible.
[/quote]
Why would it be quicker and cheaper to reprint in paper vs. electronic?
(esp. given that many entities are now scanning books for free).
If you want something fast simply scan or photograph it and
feed it to an any2djvu server to convert it to djvu and ocr it.
The result is a very small document that can be quickly read
and searched even on very slow machines (*much* better than pdf).
This has already been done for many math books: search for the
author/title along with djvu and you>ll often find links to sites
such as rapidshare or depositfiles or various russian servers.

--Bill Dubuque

Guest

In article <y8zr66tavbg.fsf@nestle.csail.mit.edu>,
Bill Dubuque <wgd@nestle.csail.mit.edu> wrote:
[quote]My experience is the opposite. As I mentioned here, some recently
purchased Springer books fell apart quite quickly. Otoh, I>ve
used electronic texts without problems over 3 decades.
[/quote]
3 decades is a few years short of 500 years.

[quote]I>ve accumulated many thousands of electronic texts over 3 decades
and I>ve never encountered any major problems. What format did you
have problems with?
[/quote]
Some examples are given in http://www.ams.org/notices/200011/commentary.pdf

[quote]Why would it be quicker and cheaper to reprint in paper vs. electronic?
[/quote]
I don>t know the reasons but the reasons are irrelevant; all I care about as
a consumer is *which* is quicker and cheaper, and not why. I plan to buy
Welsh>s matroid theory book from Dover as soon as it becomes available.
Get a fully legal electronic copy of this book into my hands more quickly
and cheaply, and I>ll change my tune. Start now---the clock is already
ticking.
--
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

Tim Smith · Guest

In article <48eb9ad5$0$313$b45e6eb0@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu>,
tchow@lsa.umich.edu wrote:

[quote]In article <y8zr66tavbg.fsf@nestle.csail.mit.edu>,
Bill Dubuque <wgd@nestle.csail.mit.edu> wrote:
I>ve accumulated many thousands of electronic texts over 3 decades
and I>ve never encountered any major problems. What format did you
have problems with?

Some examples are given in http://www.ams.org/notices/200011/commentary.pdf

[/quote]
There are some pretty ridiculous statements in that document. For
example:

Some will say that I describe a problem that does not exist. One
just builds 5 percent into the budget to cover the cost of data
transfer: every time a new technology comes along, the data gets
moved to the new format or medium. What nonsense. Who knows how to
transfer an ASCII file from an eighteen-year-old Sinclair computer
to a Linux system?

Who goes directly from an 18 year old Sinclair to a Linux system? You>d
transfer the data from the 18 year old Sinclair, to the 16 year old
system that replaced it, to the 13 year old system that replaced that,
to the 10 year old system that replaced that, to the 8 year old system
that replaced that, and so on, finally to the Linux system.

--
--Tim Smith

Guest

In article <reply_in_group-31AA75.12182207102008@news.supernews.com>,
Tim Smith <reply_in_group@mouse-potato.com> wrote:
[quote]There are some pretty ridiculous statements in that document. For
example:

Some will say that I describe a problem that does not exist. One
just builds 5 percent into the budget to cover the cost of data
transfer: every time a new technology comes along, the data gets
moved to the new format or medium. What nonsense. Who knows how to
transfer an ASCII file from an eighteen-year-old Sinclair computer
to a Linux system?

Who goes directly from an 18 year old Sinclair to a Linux system?
[/quote]
Yes, the way he stated it is ridiculous. However, the problem is real,
because sometimes for budgetary or other reasons, people will fail to
upgrade at every step. Then later, when they find the time and money
to upgrade, they find themselves having to do an "impossible" upgrade.

On a small scale, I have some 5.25" disks with some recreational programs
that I wrote on an Apple ][+ many years ago. If I had been on the ball,
I could have transferred them to 3.5" disks back when it was common to
have both kinds of drives on the same machine, and kept up with further
conversions from that point on, but I didn>t. Now it is no longer easy
for me to retrieve that information. The same kind of problem plagues
libraries. For a long period of time nobody cares enough to keep upgrading
everything, and then suddenly someone cares and it>s a pain in the neck
to make up for all those years of delinquency.
--
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

Jack Campin - bogus addre · Guest

[quote]I>ve accumulated many thousands of electronic texts over 3 decades
and I>ve never encountered any major problems. What format did you
have problems with?
Some examples are given in http://www.ams.org/notices/200011/commentary.pdf
There are some pretty ridiculous statements in that document. For
example:
Some will say that I describe a problem that does not exist. One
just builds 5 percent into the budget to cover the cost of data
transfer: every time a new technology comes along, the data gets
moved to the new format or medium. What nonsense. Who knows how to
transfer an ASCII file from an eighteen-year-old Sinclair computer
to a Linux system?
Who goes directly from an 18 year old Sinclair to a Linux system? You>d
transfer the data from the 18 year old Sinclair, to the 16 year old
system that replaced it, to the 13 year old system that replaced that,
to the 10 year old system that replaced that, to the 8 year old system
that replaced that, and so on, finally to the Linux system.
[/quote]
In some situations you have far fewer options. With airframe design
data, for forensic reasons you are not permitted to monkey about with
the data format at all. The original media must be preserved in a
readable state - which means curating magnetic tapes from as far back
as the 1960s.

I>m not sure there ever was a direct replacement for the Sinclair that
could read its media, or (rather more significantly) the early Amstrad
with its non-standard floppy disk drive. I know one prominent novelist
who worked exclusively on that. I had one of his files converted for
him - that took a specialist service most of the public didn>t know
about and I>m not sure if it still operates, so most of his early work
is probably beyond recovery by now in its original form.

==== j a c k at c a m p i n . m e . u k === <http://www.campin.me.uk> ====
Jack Campin, 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland == mob 07800 739 557
CD-ROMs and free stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, and Mac logic fonts

outofprintmath · Guest

On Oct 6, 1:30 pm, Angus Rodgers <twir...@bigfoot.com> wrote:
[quote]outofprintm...@googlemail.com> wrote:
I am aware that the current voting list is kludge and the loading
behaviour, depending on your environment, could be better. Using
Firefox it is still acceptable for me
[/quote]
On Oct 6, 1:30 pm, Angus Rodgers <twir...@bigfoot.com> wrote:
[quote]Using Firefox (2.0.0.17), it crashes my poor old Win98SE system.
Poor and old it may be, but that system is pretty stable in most
respects. Loading this page, it runs completely out of system
resources, bad things happen, and I have to reboot. Not always,
but usually.
[/quote]
You challenged me to find out a better solution and I think the new
version is remarkably faster and requires much less resources.

http://outofprintmath.blogspot.com/

Does it work for you?

-- Klaus Schmid

Angus Rodgers · Guest

On Wed, 8 Oct 2008 23:51:07 -0700 (PDT), outofprintmath
<outofprintmath@googlemail.com> wrote:

[quote]On Oct 6, 1:30 pm, Angus Rodgers <twir...@bigfoot.com> wrote:
outofprintm...@googlemail.com> wrote:
I am aware that the current voting list is kludge and the loading
behaviour, depending on your environment, could be better. Using
Firefox it is still acceptable for me

On Oct 6, 1:30 pm, Angus Rodgers <twir...@bigfoot.com> wrote:
Using Firefox (2.0.0.17), it crashes my poor old Win98SE system.
Poor and old it may be, but that system is pretty stable in most
respects. Loading this page, it runs completely out of system
resources, bad things happen, and I have to reboot. Not always,
but usually.

You challenged me to find out a better solution and I think the new
version is remarkably faster and requires much less resources.

http://outofprintmath.blogspot.com/

Does it work for you?
[/quote]
Much better, thanks! I can now keep the page open in my browser
without any ill effects.

I notice that when I click on "Show results", no matter what the book,
the text "posted by Tim Chow 7/01/2008 06:58:00 PM" invariably appears
(along with the results, of course!): is this a bug?

--
Angus Rodgers
(twirlip@ eats spam; reply to angusrod@)
Contains mild peril

Guest

I got a (spam?) email from Zip Publishing ... they say they specialize
in re-issuing out-of-print books...
Anyway, here it is: http://www.coursepackets.net/OutOfPrint.html

Guest

In article <fc3e1bae-8c0f-4fc7-acfc-5d4d5712eb35@k1g2000prb.googlegroups.com>,
<gerald9edgar@gmail.com> wrote:
[quote]I got a (spam?) email from Zip Publishing ... they say they specialize
in re-issuing out-of-print books...
Anyway, here it is: http://www.coursepackets.net/OutOfPrint.html
[/quote]
Thanks for the tip...I>ll try contacting them.
--
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


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