Book publishing advice needed

[Sarbajit Roy (testing)]

Having printed books in India on behalf of European and Australian academics, my experience is if the print run is 500+ then the cost of offset printing (on fairly decent paper) and perfect binding a softcover book with approx. 250 -300 pages is about $3.50 per copy shipped to the USA.

500 copies seems to be the crossover quantity for digital versus offset printed books.

On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 6:33 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Probably make digital copies accessible for $5, and whatever the equivalent these days is for other media. 

I say that... but probably free at this point,  thats what i would have started with.... 

At any rate,  it would be nice to have the copyright in principle.  

On Sat, Jul 4, 2020, 11:56 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric,

 

If you had the rights back, what would you do with them?

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, July 4, 2020 8:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

 

Nick said " the contract should explicitly say that rights revert to the author when the publisher no longer maintains the book in print and promotes it."

 

I handwrote that into the contract for the book on New Realism (presumably based on a suggestion from you). Alas, that's an almost nonsensical insertion at this point. The company will maintain a website that lists the book indefinitely, with it available for purchase from various marketplaces such as Amazon and Google books. So it is "maintained" and "promoted", at no cost, in perpetuity, and is always available, because books can now easily be printed on demand in single copy. I expect nowadays it might make more sense to say something like: "If the book sells no copies in X years, in any medium supported by the publisher, then the rights revert to the author."

 

It has been nine years, and the book still hasn't sold enough copies for me to see a penny. 

 

If I were writing a novel I would definitely either self publish or find a firm that focuses on online publishing, and which returns a definite marketing plan in return for their cut (there are firms that focus on kickstarting novels, or other internet forums, for example). 

 

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

 

 

On Sat, Jul 4, 2020 at 4:46 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

At the very list, the contract should explicitly say that rights revert to the author when the publisher no longer maintains the book in print and promotes it.  I often edited my magazine contracts to give only first rights.  I agree with Tom, that copyright should stay with the author.

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Tom Johnson
Sent: Saturday, July 4, 2020 2:32 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

 

Another advantage of self-publishing is that you retain the copyright.  Ergo, you can license it to a publisher for an updated edition or just distribution.

Tom

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On Sat, Jul 4, 2020 at 2:25 PM Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks. Yes, self-publishing is an option. I am looking for an official publisher mainly for one reason, namely that other scientists and researchers can cite it, since I still cling to the illusion that someone would actually do it. Normally self-published texts are not considered as reliable or trustworthy sources. I didn't expect that finding a decent publisher would be so difficult. 

 

-J.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Tom Johnson <[hidden email]>

Date: 7/4/20 20:10 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

 

Jochen:

The deal being offered strikes me as a bad deal.

 

Background:  I have been practicing and teaching about "Be Your Own Publisher" for nearly 15 years.  There are, in my opinion, some major problems with all publishers today.  It starts with control of the copyright.  I think YOU should want to maintain control of the copyright to your work.  It will depend on the contract, but many or most publishers will try to lock down the copyright in their favor for all -- ALL -- forms of your work in perpetuity and throughout the universe.  Sometimes quite literally.

 

Second, you should assume -- especially with a small publisher and you, not being as well known  as Stephen King or Daniel Steele  -- the publisher will do little if anything to promote your book beyond a mention in its catalog and, maybe, some promotional links on Amazon.  Given that, a 5 percent royalty should be seen as a con.

 

Third, given your computing experience, you should find it easy to format and produce the book yourself.  I have used Lulu.com for years.  It is especially good if you want to have both hardback, paperback and PDF editions.  Again the advantages: you keep the copyright, you can set (and change) the prices and to a degree the royalties.  Also, Lulu and Amazon handle all the backend financial arrangements and administration and pay directly and quickly.  I also use a very good, high quality digital printer in Albuquerque for paperback editions.  It is Lithexcel.  It handles all the printing (one copy to any number) quickly, along with all the fulfillment and accounting. The folks there will also, for only $25, set up your book in the Amazon inventory search engine.  Finally, there is Amazon's self-publishing arm.  While Amazon might take a bigger slice, the control over all aspects is in your hands.

 

Here's the problem/challenge with all of these.  YOU have to do the marketing/publicity/promotion.  But so what?  If you today sign with any publisher of any size you will have to do the same thing.

 

Hope this helps.  Feel free to contact me with questions.  Also you might want to see https://bit.ly/2ZvihKc 

Tom

============================================
Tom Johnson - [hidden email]
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
NM Foundation for Open Government
Check out It's The People's Data                 

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On Fri, Jul 3, 2020 at 1:29 AM Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

At one end of the spectrum there are the 5 big commercial publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. They only publish stuff their agents select to make a lot of money. There are also the big academic publishers like OUP, CUP, HUP and MIT Press, which preferably publish strictly peer-reviewed content from professors at Ivy League universities who made their PhD at the age of 20.

At the other end of the spectrum there are "predatory publishers" who publish anything you submit as long as you pay enough money for it. Open access books can also be very expensive. Publishing an "open access book" at De Gruyter for example costs up to 8000 $. You pay for it so that other people read it. It is basically some kind of advertising of your own work.

For my own new book I finally have an offer from a small publisher in Washington D.C. who is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. They are really small and offer 5% royalties. Should I accept this offer or wait for a better one? It is the only one from more than 25 publishers I have asked, and the publishers at the moment are flooded with submissions. :-/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/26/novel-writing-during-coronavirus-crisis-outbreak

 

-J.

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[Stephen Guerin-5]

I think it's just an access code to put in on the site. Haven't received it yet. Though I've heard from the author :-)

On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 3:10 PM Tom Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Steve:

I, too, have not heard of the card you speak of.  Does the card contain the book?  If so, is it a flash drive type card or what?

Tom

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On Sat, Jul 4, 2020 at 5:47 PM Stephen Guerin <[hidden email]> wrote:

Ed, 

I just ordered your 8th edition from Pearson as I was blown away by the awesomeness of the new cover. :-)

The confirmation email tells me a *physical* access card is being shipped for my digital order. 

First time I've seen this - are physical access cards for digital products common for textbooks these days? I just thought it was lazy programming in the shopping cart requiring a physical address for a digital product.

I have an urgent need to use your book this weekend and can not wait for delivery. I will be calling the author directly while I await arrival :-) It actually has to do with implementing the cover and getting the decentralized capture and rendering to realtime which hinges on realtime depth-image based rendering using spherical light fields while skipping any 3D cartesian intermediate shenanigans. Thank you for your help so far!

-S

PS, I also checked out Amazon and they appear to be the same with the physical card. 

PPS: 8th edition isn't the default choice edition on Amazon or Pearson when searching. 

On Sat, Jul 4, 2020 at 3:22 PM Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

I’ve been a book author since 1972 and a textbook author since 1989. My computer graphics textbook has been the most popular book in the area for 20 years and just came out in its eighth edition with various editions being available in Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Russian. Sadly, the book business has changed over that time; changed in way that is bad for almost everyone, especially authors. I think you’re faced with a lot of bad choices. I hope some of the following will prove helpful. And if not helpful, at least interesting.

Before I forget, you might enjoy reading of my adventures writing the first edition of my present textbook while on sabbatical in Venezuela, Ecuador, Hong Kong and Nepal. There’s a pointer to it on my home page www.cs.unm.edu/~angel 

When I had to pick a publisher, I knew the editors and  local book reps at Academic Press, Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall and Benjamin/Cummings. They dominated the CS field and did so largely because they had editors who knew the field, excellent book reps who knew the needs of the faculty and students, a willingness to invest in a book, and in-house production. None of these exist anymore and, as Tom pointed out, you're largely on your own. It’s unfortunate if you care about how many copies get sold and your royalties. I have many friends who self-published in the past. It’s a lot of work either way but I prefer to put my effort into content and not type-setting or marketing. None of my self-published friends have ever sold many books.

I had three excellent editors over 20 years. When I did my first edition, my editor hired a development editor at great expense to improve the quality of my writing. She worked with the CS faculty and grad students at Caltech and Stanford. It made a huge difference. Now almost none of these jobs exist within the publishers. All production is contracted out to the low bidders (art, typesetting, copy editing, etc) most of whom are in India. I no longer have an editor. There is one person working for the publusher with whom I communicate with to try to get things done correctly with the contractors. This last edition has been a long painful experience. 

So what happened? Books were always expensive for students, especially when sold through college bookstores. Then used book sellers appeared and Asian students started importing low cost Asian versions of the standard textbooks. Under US copyright laws, both are legal. The publishers responded by upping prices which reduced sales even more.

And then came electronic media. At first, my book, like most others, was still print-only. But the publisher sent perfect unwatermarked pdfs to all the schools what adopted the book for use by students with special needs. Wasn’t long before those pdfs made it to the Web. Then they had a electronic version and a kindle version that students could rent for a semester or year. The publisher, the largest in the business, was clueless about web security and had no idea that Kindles are not secure. Very quickly, the book appeared (with most of the other cs texts and various best sellers) on a Russian website as a “public service.” End of paid sales.

The new edition is only available in electronic form and the publisher claims it is only available on a secure site. I doubt anyone on this list believes that.

Although I never in the past had issues with the publisher having the copyright, which was pretty standard, I wish I had it now. Since there is no hope of making significant royalties now (we used), my coauthor and I would like to put the book out for free on our websites rather than having it appear on various illegal Russian sites known to most students.

Personally, I no longer care about royalties but the long term issue I worry about is why would any young person write a textbook. It’s a huge amount of work and usually not something that in the academic world is valued as highly as research papers and grant funding.

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

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[Sarbajit Roy (testing)]

Edward

The PDF of the 7th edition of your book being widely circulated was very likely not generated from its Kindle version, but from the Postscript version used to print your book. It was generated using Adobe Distiller 7+ for a Macintosh. Must have been cloned from one of those unwatermarked copies dished out by your publisher's marketing team to "potential" customers.

Sarbajit

On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 2:52 AM Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

I’ve been a book author since 1972 and a textbook author since 1989. My computer graphics textbook has been the most popular book in the area for 20 years and just came out in its eighth edition with various editions being available in Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Russian. Sadly, the book business has changed over that time; changed in way that is bad for almost everyone, especially authors. I think you’re faced with a lot of bad choices. I hope some of the following will prove helpful. And if not helpful, at least interesting.

Before I forget, you might enjoy reading of my adventures writing the first edition of my present textbook while on sabbatical in Venezuela, Ecuador, Hong Kong and Nepal. There’s a pointer to it on my home page www.cs.unm.edu/~angel 

When I had to pick a publisher, I knew the editors and  local book reps at Academic Press, Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall and Benjamin/Cummings. They dominated the CS field and did so largely because they had editors who knew the field, excellent book reps who knew the needs of the faculty and students, a willingness to invest in a book, and in-house production. None of these exist anymore and, as Tom pointed out, you're largely on your own. It’s unfortunate if you care about how many copies get sold and your royalties. I have many friends who self-published in the past. It’s a lot of work either way but I prefer to put my effort into content and not type-setting or marketing. None of my self-published friends have ever sold many books.

I had three excellent editors over 20 years. When I did my first edition, my editor hired a development editor at great expense to improve the quality of my writing. She worked with the CS faculty and grad students at Caltech and Stanford. It made a huge difference. Now almost none of these jobs exist within the publishers. All production is contracted out to the low bidders (art, typesetting, copy editing, etc) most of whom are in India. I no longer have an editor. There is one person working for the publusher with whom I communicate with to try to get things done correctly with the contractors. This last edition has been a long painful experience. 

So what happened? Books were always expensive for students, especially when sold through college bookstores. Then used book sellers appeared and Asian students started importing low cost Asian versions of the standard textbooks. Under US copyright laws, both are legal. The publishers responded by upping prices which reduced sales even more.

And then came electronic media. At first, my book, like most others, was still print-only. But the publisher sent perfect unwatermarked pdfs to all the schools what adopted the book for use by students with special needs. Wasn’t long before those pdfs made it to the Web. Then they had a electronic version and a kindle version that students could rent for a semester or year. The publisher, the largest in the business, was clueless about web security and had no idea that Kindles are not secure. Very quickly, the book appeared (with most of the other cs texts and various best sellers) on a Russian website as a “public service.” End of paid sales.

The new edition is only available in electronic form and the publisher claims it is only available on a secure site. I doubt anyone on this list believes that.

Although I never in the past had issues with the publisher having the copyright, which was pretty standard, I wish I had it now. Since there is no hope of making significant royalties now (we used), my coauthor and I would like to put the book out for free on our websites rather than having it appear on various illegal Russian sites known to most students.

Personally, I no longer care about royalties but the long term issue I worry about is why would any young person write a textbook. It’s a huge amount of work and usually not something that in the academic world is valued as highly as research papers and grant funding.

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 4, 2020, at 2:25 PM, Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks. Yes, self-publishing is an option. I am looking for an official publisher mainly for one reason, namely that other scientists and researchers can cite it, since I still cling to the illusion that someone would actually do it. Normally self-published texts are not considered as reliable or trustworthy sources. I didn't expect that finding a decent publisher would be so difficult. 

-J.

-------- Original message --------

From: Tom Johnson <[hidden email]>

Date: 7/4/20 20:10 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

Jochen:

The deal being offered strikes me as a bad deal.

Background:  I have been practicing and teaching about "Be Your Own Publisher" for nearly 15 years.  There are, in my opinion, some major problems with all publishers today.  It starts with control of the copyright.  I think YOU should want to maintain control of the copyright to your work.  It will depend on the contract, but many or most publishers will try to lock down the copyright in their favor for all -- ALL -- forms of your work in perpetuity and throughout the universe.  Sometimes quite literally.

Second, you should assume -- especially with a small publisher and you, not being as well known  as Stephen King or Daniel Steele  -- the publisher will do little if anything to promote your book beyond a mention in its catalog and, maybe, some promotional links on Amazon.  Given that, a 5 percent royalty should be seen as a con.

Third, given your computing experience, you should find it easy to format and produce the book yourself.  I have used Lulu.com for years.  It is especially good if you want to have both hardback, paperback and PDF editions.  Again the advantages: you keep the copyright, you can set (and change) the prices and to a degree the royalties.  Also, Lulu and Amazon handle all the backend financial arrangements and administration and pay directly and quickly.  I also use a very good, high quality digital printer in Albuquerque for paperback editions.  It is Lithexcel.  It handles all the printing (one copy to any number) quickly, along with all the fulfillment and accounting. The folks there will also, for only $25, set up your book in the Amazon inventory search engine.  Finally, there is Amazon's self-publishing arm.  While Amazon might take a bigger slice, the control over all aspects is in your hands.

Here's the problem/challenge with all of these.  YOU have to do the marketing/publicity/promotion.  But so what?  If you today sign with any publisher of any size you will have to do the same thing.

Hope this helps.  Feel free to contact me with questions.  Also you might want to see https://bit.ly/2ZvihKc 

Tom

============================================
Tom Johnson - [hidden email]
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
NM Foundation for Open Government
Check out It's The People's Data                 

============================================

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On Fri, Jul 3, 2020 at 1:29 AM Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

At one end of the spectrum there are the 5 big commercial publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. They only publish stuff their agents select to make a lot of money. There are also the big academic publishers like OUP, CUP, HUP and MIT Press, which preferably publish strictly peer-reviewed content from professors at Ivy League universities who made their PhD at the age of 20.

At the other end of the spectrum there are "predatory publishers" who publish anything you submit as long as you pay enough money for it. Open access books can also be very expensive. Publishing an "open access book" at De Gruyter for example costs up to 8000 $. You pay for it so that other people read it. It is basically some kind of advertising of your own work.

For my own new book I finally have an offer from a small publisher in Washington D.C. who is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. They are really small and offer 5% royalties. Should I accept this offer or wait for a better one? It is the only one from more than 25 publishers I have asked, and the publishers at the moment are flooded with submissions. :-/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/26/novel-writing-during-coronavirus-crisis-outbreak

-J.

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[David Eric Smith]

Not good for me to do this, so let me try to be brief (never a thing I am good at).

0.  To repeat myself for the 100th time, of course if one structures conversations around writing down single words (“evolve”, “emergent”, “complexity") and arguing about what they _really_ mean, one can go on forever and happily never settle.  More complete sentences and operational definitions create a much more disappointing landscape, in which one can either reach an understanding, or reach a hard problem of insight for which one lacks a new idea, and either way the conversation does tend to end.  So one reboots with the one-word questions, re-opens the exploration phase, and tries another anneal.

On Jul 6, 2020, at 6:03 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

But this is useful. 

To put the question baldly, wtf is natural design, anyway, as a descriptive property. 

One can construe the question and its answer in many valid ways, and I only mean to say a specific thing about one of them; not to assert that is is better or only, just that it can be understood.

Natural design, interpreted descriptively, or causally, is among other things a distributional concept.  Basic commitments are these:

1. There is some sensible way to make a division of objects from environments.  It is not necessary to think of _the_ most naive way one might try to do this, and then fret that there are lots of cases it would get wrong; we have many tools for such divisions, and the ability to think precisely about many distinct kinds of relations.  But suppose there is some such division.  Animals are objects.  They might live on land or they might live in water.

2. Because there is a notion of factorability from 1, there are ways to talk about marginal distributions over the factors, and joint distributions over the combinations.  Animals might have lots of forms, which are variable properties _of_ them.  Environments can be described in terms of many properties, and particular classes of environments might have distributions of properties that are concentrated in one region or another of the values the properties can take.  With regard to “being a place to live”, the “land” environments are concentrated over where weight-bearing is a challenge; the water environments are concentrated over where resistance to relative motion is a challenge.

3. Starting conditions for some joint distribution on objects and their environments can be different from later conditions for the same pairs.  So animals that have history in one set of settings can find themselves spending more time in other settings.  They are still good at what they were doing before, but not necessarily at what they mostly spend their time doing now.  Scientists can experience this phenomenon too, most especially when they are put into managerial positions.

4. One can put forth various null hypotheses for what a joint distribution could be, including the product of marginal distributions drawn from other conditions.  A joint distribution _could_ look like a product of a marginal distribution over tortious-like or elephant-like animals that are good at weight-bearing, with a marginal distribution over deep-water environments where weight-bearing is not a problem to be solved, but surmounting resistance to motion is a problem.  Often we imagine that the starting conditions in 3 have this character.  This is the early output of using something in a new way (the “ex” part of “exaptation”) before selective dynamics has produced the “aptation” part.

5. Joint distributions can change with time (evolve in the dynamical systems sense) so that at late times they are different from the products of marginals that were the null model or the starting condition.  One can speak of “information flow” from regularities in the environment (the fact that its distribution is concentrated in one part of the parameter space and not in another), “into” the marginal on the object, reducing some relative entropy for that marginal distribution.  The descendant animals in a population can have attenuated traits good for weight-bearing, relative to the traits expressed by their ancestors, and can have enhanced traits for reducing resistance to relative motion.  The information flow is the same as repeated application of a Bayesian updating rule (see Cosma Shalizi and Andrew Gelman, Electronic Journal of Statistcs, in the appendix somewhere) though I think this result has been known since antiquity).  In that direction, it is the “aptation” of adaptation, exaptation, or whatever.  Of course, events reducing a relative entropy for the environment could also flow the other way.  Phytoplankton can change viscosity, oxygenation, light-penetration, etc., of their environment, and this is what the niche-construction and ecosystem-engineering guys go on about.  There probably is a Bayesian construction for that too.

6. Instead of talking about information “flow” from one marginal to the other, one can instead speak of the increase in “mutual information” as the difference of some relative entropy of the joint distribution from relative entropies of the marginals, and can characterize a degree of adaptation through the increase in that mutual information.  Mutual information can increase through either adaptation or environmental modification, so merely its increase does not report on a directionality.  Chris Adami in early papers liked to emphasize the mutual information approach, because it is the correct zeroth-order answer to facile versions of “Shannon information isn’t semantic information”.  Nihat Ay and collaborators have done a lot, instantiated in robotic problems, with notions of information flows.  Probably David Wolpert up at SFI could reel off 400 citations summarizing the leading 1% of activity in the field as of the last 24 hours, if asked.  There are some nice things to say about how to cut up systems and environments, and to talk about how each affects the other, which come out of recent “stochastic thermodynamics”, and which I will get back to trying to write up after I exit this email.  It’s all more or less elementary, though.

I guess everybody in the list already knows this, so Nick’s question “wtf is natural design” is meant to take up where the above leaves off.  I guess Nick means “after the above trivialities are all acknowledged, then what does the expression _really_ mean”.  But those questions are always hard for me to understand when expressed at the level of 4 words, if one hasn’t first solved as much with the trivialities as one can, and then been more explicit about what is left unsatisfying or unclear.  Those things tend to be in the eye of the beholder, and cannot readily be guessed if there isn’t a starting platform of using the trivialities to their fullest extent.

Then, however, I think we encounter Jochen’s and I guess Russ’s point about “everything and nothing” (a point I also routinely make).  The statistical formulation above is enough to show constructively that there is a thing to describe, that it is not tautological and that it can vary in degree, following which we can attach a name to that construction.  But how it is achieved mechanistically can be through endlessly variable relations.  

This is the sense in which Darwinism per se was never much of a scientific revolution, and was and unfortunately still is mostly a social revolution of trying to wrestle thoughts about life away from the vitalists.  The scientific advancement, even in Darwin’s work, seems to have been mostly in showing that one could get enough control over the relations for particular classes of cases, to make Bayesian updating a plausibly _useful_ explanation.

From there one can branch into sub-categories: how important is individuality and population structure, versus continua, etc.  How much does one get from the substrate (chemistry, code, cognitive events, social norms and institutions?), and what part of the potential for design derives from the substrate and not from the general-purpose filtering problem?

But, enough.  

Eric

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[Edward Angel]

Thanks but the story is more complex. 

What transpired is in retrospect somewhat amusing. I received an email from someone at a university that was using the book asking if I knew there was a ps file on the web of the whole book. I checked it out, contacted the instructor who had it taken down. I had no idea how anyone had obtained a perfect copy of the book. Even during copyediting, I never was given access to a final ps version with even the typesetting marks. My editor started a big investigation at Pearson to see who had violated security during production only to find out after weeks that the people at Pearson who dealt with accessibility issues were sending out the file to every school that adopted the book (at the time around 200 just in the US).

What is odd to me is that the last time I checked libgen.io, which was a while ago, the version there was not a ps version put a pdf in which you could use the TOC interactively so I figured it was the kindle version which my editor, who had become somewhat expert at this, showed me how easy it is to get the kindle version. Apparently what is the the situation now is that the ps version is libgen.is so someone else must have uploaded it.

The material on the Indian decision on respect to fair use was very interesting. I was familiar with the fair use policies in the U.S. and the U.K. In spirit, they are the same. However, the problem is not fair use but with sites like libgen, where anyone can upload a file irrespective of copyright or ownership  That file is then available worldwide to everyone. Consequently, the holders of the copyright have no protection at all other than some people having ethical issues with libgen. Sadly, I find many of my colleagues and students do not see this as an ethical issue. 

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 5, 2020, at 4:14 PM, Sarbajit Roy <[hidden email]> wrote:

Edward

The PDF of the 7th edition of your book being widely circulated was very likely not generated from its Kindle version, but from the Postscript version used to print your book. It was generated using Adobe Distiller 7+ for a Macintosh. Must have been cloned from one of those unwatermarked copies dished out by your publisher's marketing team to "potential" customers.

Sarbajit

On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 2:52 AM Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

I’ve been a book author since 1972 and a textbook author since 1989. My computer graphics textbook has been the most popular book in the area for 20 years and just came out in its eighth edition with various editions being available in Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Russian. Sadly, the book business has changed over that time; changed in way that is bad for almost everyone, especially authors. I think you’re faced with a lot of bad choices. I hope some of the following will prove helpful. And if not helpful, at least interesting.

Before I forget, you might enjoy reading of my adventures writing the first edition of my present textbook while on sabbatical in Venezuela, Ecuador, Hong Kong and Nepal. There’s a pointer to it on my home page www.cs.unm.edu/~angel 

When I had to pick a publisher, I knew the editors and  local book reps at Academic Press, Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall and Benjamin/Cummings. They dominated the CS field and did so largely because they had editors who knew the field, excellent book reps who knew the needs of the faculty and students, a willingness to invest in a book, and in-house production. None of these exist anymore and, as Tom pointed out, you're largely on your own. It’s unfortunate if you care about how many copies get sold and your royalties. I have many friends who self-published in the past. It’s a lot of work either way but I prefer to put my effort into content and not type-setting or marketing. None of my self-published friends have ever sold many books.

I had three excellent editors over 20 years. When I did my first edition, my editor hired a development editor at great expense to improve the quality of my writing. She worked with the CS faculty and grad students at Caltech and Stanford. It made a huge difference. Now almost none of these jobs exist within the publishers. All production is contracted out to the low bidders (art, typesetting, copy editing, etc) most of whom are in India. I no longer have an editor. There is one person working for the publusher with whom I communicate with to try to get things done correctly with the contractors. This last edition has been a long painful experience. 

So what happened? Books were always expensive for students, especially when sold through college bookstores. Then used book sellers appeared and Asian students started importing low cost Asian versions of the standard textbooks. Under US copyright laws, both are legal. The publishers responded by upping prices which reduced sales even more.

And then came electronic media. At first, my book, like most others, was still print-only. But the publisher sent perfect unwatermarked pdfs to all the schools what adopted the book for use by students with special needs. Wasn’t long before those pdfs made it to the Web. Then they had a electronic version and a kindle version that students could rent for a semester or year. The publisher, the largest in the business, was clueless about web security and had no idea that Kindles are not secure. Very quickly, the book appeared (with most of the other cs texts and various best sellers) on a Russian website as a “public service.” End of paid sales.

The new edition is only available in electronic form and the publisher claims it is only available on a secure site. I doubt anyone on this list believes that.

Although I never in the past had issues with the publisher having the copyright, which was pretty standard, I wish I had it now. Since there is no hope of making significant royalties now (we used), my coauthor and I would like to put the book out for free on our websites rather than having it appear on various illegal Russian sites known to most students.

Personally, I no longer care about royalties but the long term issue I worry about is why would any young person write a textbook. It’s a huge amount of work and usually not something that in the academic world is valued as highly as research papers and grant funding.

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 4, 2020, at 2:25 PM, Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks. Yes, self-publishing is an option. I am looking for an official publisher mainly for one reason, namely that other scientists and researchers can cite it, since I still cling to the illusion that someone would actually do it. Normally self-published texts are not considered as reliable or trustworthy sources. I didn't expect that finding a decent publisher would be so difficult. 

-J.

-------- Original message --------

From: Tom Johnson <[hidden email]>

Date: 7/4/20 20:10 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

Jochen:

The deal being offered strikes me as a bad deal.

Background:  I have been practicing and teaching about "Be Your Own Publisher" for nearly 15 years.  There are, in my opinion, some major problems with all publishers today.  It starts with control of the copyright.  I think YOU should want to maintain control of the copyright to your work.  It will depend on the contract, but many or most publishers will try to lock down the copyright in their favor for all -- ALL -- forms of your work in perpetuity and throughout the universe.  Sometimes quite literally.

Second, you should assume -- especially with a small publisher and you, not being as well known  as Stephen King or Daniel Steele  -- the publisher will do little if anything to promote your book beyond a mention in its catalog and, maybe, some promotional links on Amazon.  Given that, a 5 percent royalty should be seen as a con.

Third, given your computing experience, you should find it easy to format and produce the book yourself.  I have used Lulu.com for years.  It is especially good if you want to have both hardback, paperback and PDF editions.  Again the advantages: you keep the copyright, you can set (and change) the prices and to a degree the royalties.  Also, Lulu and Amazon handle all the backend financial arrangements and administration and pay directly and quickly.  I also use a very good, high quality digital printer in Albuquerque for paperback editions.  It is Lithexcel.  It handles all the printing (one copy to any number) quickly, along with all the fulfillment and accounting. The folks there will also, for only $25, set up your book in the Amazon inventory search engine.  Finally, there is Amazon's self-publishing arm.  While Amazon might take a bigger slice, the control over all aspects is in your hands.

Here's the problem/challenge with all of these.  YOU have to do the marketing/publicity/promotion.  But so what?  If you today sign with any publisher of any size you will have to do the same thing.

Hope this helps.  Feel free to contact me with questions.  Also you might want to see https://bit.ly/2ZvihKc 

Tom

============================================
Tom Johnson - [hidden email]
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
NM Foundation for Open Government
Check out It's The People's Data                 

============================================

Virus-free. www.avast.com

On Fri, Jul 3, 2020 at 1:29 AM Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

At one end of the spectrum there are the 5 big commercial publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. They only publish stuff their agents select to make a lot of money. There are also the big academic publishers like OUP, CUP, HUP and MIT Press, which preferably publish strictly peer-reviewed content from professors at Ivy League universities who made their PhD at the age of 20.

At the other end of the spectrum there are "predatory publishers" who publish anything you submit as long as you pay enough money for it. Open access books can also be very expensive. Publishing an "open access book" at De Gruyter for example costs up to 8000 $. You pay for it so that other people read it. It is basically some kind of advertising of your own work.

For my own new book I finally have an offer from a small publisher in Washington D.C. who is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. They are really small and offer 5% royalties. Should I accept this offer or wait for a better one? It is the only one from more than 25 publishers I have asked, and the publishers at the moment are flooded with submissions. :-/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/26/novel-writing-during-coronavirus-crisis-outbreak

-J.

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Hi Nick,

 

I’m attempting to identify another use of the word evolve that you will accept as valid, nothing more.

In computational phylogenetics, one typically uses an error distribution (which arises from biochemistry) to estimate distance between different DNA sequences.   The probabilities of adenine changing into guanine, to cytosine, or to thymine, of guanine changing into cytosine or thymine, and of cytosine changing into thymine.  This symmetrical matrix serves as a sort of clock.

 

One assumes that it is the exception, not the rule, that mutations arise from environmental pressure.   With these assumptions (and sufficiently long sequences), one can place some individual contemporary organisms as closer and others as farther away in evolution distance, or time.   The task is to find the most likely ancestral sequences.   The evolution of which I speak is process of iterating a probabilistic model such that one sequence of inferred ancestral DNA iteratively morphs (evolves), site-by-site, into an observed sequence of DNA.    This definition has nothing to do with adaptation, other than it can be used to quantify when unusual things happen.

 

Marcus

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Sunday, July 5, 2020 at 2:03 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

Sorry.  I may not be worth your effort, here.  I just don’t understand what you said.

 

Let it be the case that as we examine the history of species, there are repeated (and therefore predictable) pathways through which they pass.  A lineage of any sort, entering the water at some historical stage becomes more streamlined, let’s say.  Because streamlining is characteristic of creatures that move through water, we say that any such lineage has adapted to life in water.   Thus, in my way of thinking, to evolve [phylogenetically]in this case is to become more like creatures that move through water.   I have never been entirely clear what this additional constraint, ADAPTED phyletic descent, constitutes.  I have been writing for many years, and I have been challenged on many points, but nobody has challenged me on this one, To put the question baldly, wtf is natural design, anyway, as a descriptive property.  Please don’t answer that design is, whatever designers produce, because that is an example of a tethered description, and leaves us with nothing to say about the good that ‘designers” produce in the world.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology                                                                                                                                       

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 2:49 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

A matrix exponential proceeds toward an equilibrium state.  

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Sunday, July 5, 2020 at 1:47 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

So, phylogenetic evolution is evolution that proceeds toward adaptation.  How would a state theorist characterize that constraint?

 

n

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 2:37 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

Yes, phylogenetic evolution is often modeled using a matrix exponential.

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Sunday, July 5, 2020 at 1:35 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

Marcus,

 

So in your sense, a system evolves if it passes along a predictable pathway from state to state.   I wonder if phylogenetic evolution is a special case of yours.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 1:19 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

“Evolve” in this sense:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamical_system

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Sunday, July 5, 2020 at 9:47 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

Jochen,

 

FOOD FIGHT!  FOOD FIGHT!  I absolutely and totally disagree that “everything evolves” [while agreeing that anything that is everything is nothing].  Rocks and tornadoes do not evolve.  They change, but the don’t evolve.  Evolution (to me) is a very specific pattern of design arising through phylogenetic descent – lineages being bent through time to match their circumstances.  I am not entirely sure that some inanimate things don’t evolve.  I would have a hard time arguing ferociously that the sorting of pebbles on a beach is not the result of some sort of evolution.  I certainly don’t want to define evolution as something that only organisms can do, if only because that turns the assertion, “only organisms evolve” into a nothing, or an everything, depending on how you care to look at it

 

In this matter, as in all matters, Eric will correct me.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 4:47 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

Russ, I agree. Maybe we found it already, the theory of everything & nothing: Darwin's theory of evolution. It is a theory of everything because everything evolves. It doesn't say anything how fish, insects, dinosaurs, mammals, birds, religions, civilizations, companies, parties or states look like, though. Therefore it is also a theory of nothing. I have to reread your book.

https://www.hpcoders.com.au/nothing.html

 

-J.

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Russell Standish <[hidden email]>

Date: 7/5/20 11:49 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

 

Being self-published hasn't stopped my book "Theory of Nothing" from
being cited. According to Google Scholar, it has 22 citations, 9th on
my list in terms of citation count, just after "Why Occams Razor", a
peer reviewed paper on similar topics. It got a bit of a boost from
Max Tegmark's book, as he singled it out as inspiration, kind of ironic when it
was one of Max's "crazy papers" that inspired me to write "Why Occams
Razor" and then "Theory of Nothing".

I think you need to have a reason to publish a book. Making money is
not one them - almost nobody makes money from writing books. Vanity
publications ("it looks good on the CV") is another one to avoid. Best
bet is if you have a story or a topic that needs telling, and you
think would be interesting to other people, then go for it. Marketing
then becomes telling other people about it, advancing arguments from
it in fora like this. With a bit of luck, it goes viral.

One good reason for writing academic books is that it gives you
expanded scope to explain your ideas more fully, and in less
technically forbidding terms. Allows you to expand your readership
beyond the narrow circle reading your peer revieed articles. But you
probably want those peer reviewed articles to back up/draw upon your
book work. That's probably the reason why old academics write books,
and young ones write papers.

In my case, I've self-published 3 books so far: "Theory of Nothing",
which has sold over 1000 copies, and perhaps 2-3 times as many free
downloads from my website and the usual pirate websites, but in no way
does the royalties cover the time I put into it (unless being paid
less than a Calcutta rickshaw driver was a career ambition); "Amoeba's
Secret", a translation of a semi-autobiography by Bruno Marchal, which
was about the clearest exposition he gave of his ideas, and "Magic
Cottage", an Anthology of my son's writing, which was quite exquisite,
and sadly something he's not really doing now. Magic Cottage proved to
be more of a vanity publication than I thought it would be - but
partly because he never took up my suggestion of leaving a copy around
his college room, now apartment, where it could act as a conversation
starter. I also envisaged him using the book when going for jobs that
might require writing skills, but it seems he hasn't needed to do that
to date.


Cheers

On Sat, Jul 04, 2020 at 10:25:03PM +0200, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> Thanks. Yes, self-publishing is an option. I am looking for an official
> publisher mainly for one reason, namely that other scientists and researchers
> can cite it, since I still cling to the illusion that someone would actually do
> it. Normally self-published texts are not considered as reliable or trustworthy
> sources. I didn't expect that finding a decent publisher would be so
> difficult.
>
> -J.
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Tom Johnson <[hidden email]>
> Date: 7/4/20 20:10 (GMT+01:00)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed
>
> Jochen:
> The deal being offered strikes me as a bad deal.
>
> Background:  I have been practicing and teaching about "Be Your Own Publisher"
> for nearly 15 years.  There are, in my opinion, some major problems with all
> publishers today.  It starts with control of the copyright.  I think YOU should
> want to maintain control of the copyright to your work.  It will depend on the
> contract, but many or most publishers will try to lock down the copyright in
> their favor for all -- ALL -- forms of your work in perpetuity and throughout
> the universe.  Sometimes quite literally.
>
> Second, you should assume -- especially with a small publisher and you, not
> being as well known  as Stephen King or Daniel Steele  -- the publisher will do
> little if anything to promote your book beyond a mention in its catalog and,
> maybe, some promotional links on Amazon.  Given that, a 5 percent royalty
> should be seen as a con.
>
> Third, given your computing experience, you should find it easy to format and
> produce the book yourself.  I have used Lulu.com for years.  It is especially
> good if you want to have both hardback, paperback and PDF editions.  Again the
> advantages: you keep the copyright, you can set (and change) the prices and to
> a degree the royalties.  Also, Lulu and Amazon handle all the backend financial
> arrangements and administration and pay directly and quickly.  I also use a
> very good, high quality digital printer in Albuquerque for paperback editions.
> It is Lithexcel.  It handles all the printing (one copy to any number) quickly,
> along with all the fulfillment and accounting. The folks there will also, for
> only $25, set up your book in the Amazon inventory search engine.  Finally,
> there is Amazon's self-publishing arm.  While Amazon might take a bigger slice,
> the control over all aspects is in your hands.
>
> Here's the problem/challenge with all of these.  YOU have to do the marketing/
> publicity/promotion.  But so what?  If you today sign with any publisher of any
> size you will have to do the same thing.
>
> Hope this helps.  Feel free to contact me with questions.  Also you might want
> to see https://bit.ly/2ZvihKc
> Tom
>
> ============================================
> Tom Johnson - [hidden email]
> Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
> 505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
> NM Foundation for Open Government
> Check out It's The People's Data                
> ============================================
>
>
>
> [icon-] Virus-free. www.avast.com
>
> 
>
> On Fri, Jul 3, 2020 at 1:29 AM Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>     At one end of the spectrum there are the 5 big commercial publishers
>     Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon &
>     Schuster. They only publish stuff their agents select to make a lot of
>     money. There are also the big academic publishers like OUP, CUP, HUP and
>     MIT Press, which preferably publish strictly peer-reviewed content from
>     professors at Ivy League universities who made their PhD at the age of 20.
>
>     At the other end of the spectrum there are "predatory publishers" who
>     publish anything you submit as long as you pay enough money for it. Open
>     access books can also be very expensive. Publishing an "open access book"
>     at De Gruyter for example costs up to 8000 $. You pay for it so that other
>     people read it. It is basically some kind of advertising of your own work.
>
>     For my own new book I finally have an offer from a small publisher in
>     Washington D.C. who is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. They are
>     really small and offer 5% royalties. Should I accept this offer or wait for
>     a better one? It is the only one from more than 25 publishers I have asked,
>     and the publishers at the moment are flooded with submissions. :-/
>     https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/26/
>     novel-writing-during-coronavirus-crisis-outbreak
>
>     -J.
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>

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--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Principal, High Performance Coders     [hidden email]
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[Sarbajit Roy (testing)]

I got your book from here
https://www.pdfdrive.com/interactive-computer-graphics-a-top-down-approach-with-webgl-edward-angel-and-dave-d38281420.html

The Indian judgment is clear, Reproduction is limited to a copy which the teacher/institute has LEGALLY purchased.

There are other judgments from the same court directing that thousands of infringing movie piracy websites (and their whack-a-mole clones) are blocked in India for copyright violation and harm caused to producers.

https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Utv_Software_Communication_Ltd._..._vs_1337X.To_And_Ors_on_10_April_2019-1.pdf

Sarbajit

On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 5:17 AM Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks but the story is more complex. 

What transpired is in retrospect somewhat amusing. I received an email from someone at a university that was using the book asking if I knew there was a ps file on the web of the whole book. I checked it out, contacted the instructor who had it taken down. I had no idea how anyone had obtained a perfect copy of the book. Even during copyediting, I never was given access to a final ps version with even the typesetting marks. My editor started a big investigation at Pearson to see who had violated security during production only to find out after weeks that the people at Pearson who dealt with accessibility issues were sending out the file to every school that adopted the book (at the time around 200 just in the US).

What is odd to me is that the last time I checked libgen.io, which was a while ago, the version there was not a ps version put a pdf in which you could use the TOC interactively so I figured it was the kindle version which my editor, who had become somewhat expert at this, showed me how easy it is to get the kindle version. Apparently what is the the situation now is that the ps version is libgen.is so someone else must have uploaded it.

The material on the Indian decision on respect to fair use was very interesting. I was familiar with the fair use policies in the U.S. and the U.K. In spirit, they are the same. However, the problem is not fair use but with sites like libgen, where anyone can upload a file irrespective of copyright or ownership  That file is then available worldwide to everyone. Consequently, the holders of the copyright have no protection at all other than some people having ethical issues with libgen. Sadly, I find many of my colleagues and students do not see this as an ethical issue. 

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 5, 2020, at 4:14 PM, Sarbajit Roy <[hidden email]> wrote:

Edward

The PDF of the 7th edition of your book being widely circulated was very likely not generated from its Kindle version, but from the Postscript version used to print your book. It was generated using Adobe Distiller 7+ for a Macintosh. Must have been cloned from one of those unwatermarked copies dished out by your publisher's marketing team to "potential" customers.

Sarbajit

On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 2:52 AM Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

I’ve been a book author since 1972 and a textbook author since 1989. My computer graphics textbook has been the most popular book in the area for 20 years and just came out in its eighth edition with various editions being available in Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Russian. Sadly, the book business has changed over that time; changed in way that is bad for almost everyone, especially authors. I think you’re faced with a lot of bad choices. I hope some of the following will prove helpful. And if not helpful, at least interesting.

Before I forget, you might enjoy reading of my adventures writing the first edition of my present textbook while on sabbatical in Venezuela, Ecuador, Hong Kong and Nepal. There’s a pointer to it on my home page www.cs.unm.edu/~angel 

When I had to pick a publisher, I knew the editors and  local book reps at Academic Press, Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall and Benjamin/Cummings. They dominated the CS field and did so largely because they had editors who knew the field, excellent book reps who knew the needs of the faculty and students, a willingness to invest in a book, and in-house production. None of these exist anymore and, as Tom pointed out, you're largely on your own. It’s unfortunate if you care about how many copies get sold and your royalties. I have many friends who self-published in the past. It’s a lot of work either way but I prefer to put my effort into content and not type-setting or marketing. None of my self-published friends have ever sold many books.

I had three excellent editors over 20 years. When I did my first edition, my editor hired a development editor at great expense to improve the quality of my writing. She worked with the CS faculty and grad students at Caltech and Stanford. It made a huge difference. Now almost none of these jobs exist within the publishers. All production is contracted out to the low bidders (art, typesetting, copy editing, etc) most of whom are in India. I no longer have an editor. There is one person working for the publusher with whom I communicate with to try to get things done correctly with the contractors. This last edition has been a long painful experience. 

So what happened? Books were always expensive for students, especially when sold through college bookstores. Then used book sellers appeared and Asian students started importing low cost Asian versions of the standard textbooks. Under US copyright laws, both are legal. The publishers responded by upping prices which reduced sales even more.

And then came electronic media. At first, my book, like most others, was still print-only. But the publisher sent perfect unwatermarked pdfs to all the schools what adopted the book for use by students with special needs. Wasn’t long before those pdfs made it to the Web. Then they had a electronic version and a kindle version that students could rent for a semester or year. The publisher, the largest in the business, was clueless about web security and had no idea that Kindles are not secure. Very quickly, the book appeared (with most of the other cs texts and various best sellers) on a Russian website as a “public service.” End of paid sales.

The new edition is only available in electronic form and the publisher claims it is only available on a secure site. I doubt anyone on this list believes that.

Although I never in the past had issues with the publisher having the copyright, which was pretty standard, I wish I had it now. Since there is no hope of making significant royalties now (we used), my coauthor and I would like to put the book out for free on our websites rather than having it appear on various illegal Russian sites known to most students.

Personally, I no longer care about royalties but the long term issue I worry about is why would any young person write a textbook. It’s a huge amount of work and usually not something that in the academic world is valued as highly as research papers and grant funding.

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 4, 2020, at 2:25 PM, Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks. Yes, self-publishing is an option. I am looking for an official publisher mainly for one reason, namely that other scientists and researchers can cite it, since I still cling to the illusion that someone would actually do it. Normally self-published texts are not considered as reliable or trustworthy sources. I didn't expect that finding a decent publisher would be so difficult. 

-J.

-------- Original message --------

From: Tom Johnson <[hidden email]>

Date: 7/4/20 20:10 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

Jochen:

The deal being offered strikes me as a bad deal.

Background:  I have been practicing and teaching about "Be Your Own Publisher" for nearly 15 years.  There are, in my opinion, some major problems with all publishers today.  It starts with control of the copyright.  I think YOU should want to maintain control of the copyright to your work.  It will depend on the contract, but many or most publishers will try to lock down the copyright in their favor for all -- ALL -- forms of your work in perpetuity and throughout the universe.  Sometimes quite literally.

Second, you should assume -- especially with a small publisher and you, not being as well known  as Stephen King or Daniel Steele  -- the publisher will do little if anything to promote your book beyond a mention in its catalog and, maybe, some promotional links on Amazon.  Given that, a 5 percent royalty should be seen as a con.

Third, given your computing experience, you should find it easy to format and produce the book yourself.  I have used Lulu.com for years.  It is especially good if you want to have both hardback, paperback and PDF editions.  Again the advantages: you keep the copyright, you can set (and change) the prices and to a degree the royalties.  Also, Lulu and Amazon handle all the backend financial arrangements and administration and pay directly and quickly.  I also use a very good, high quality digital printer in Albuquerque for paperback editions.  It is Lithexcel.  It handles all the printing (one copy to any number) quickly, along with all the fulfillment and accounting. The folks there will also, for only $25, set up your book in the Amazon inventory search engine.  Finally, there is Amazon's self-publishing arm.  While Amazon might take a bigger slice, the control over all aspects is in your hands.

Here's the problem/challenge with all of these.  YOU have to do the marketing/publicity/promotion.  But so what?  If you today sign with any publisher of any size you will have to do the same thing.

Hope this helps.  Feel free to contact me with questions.  Also you might want to see https://bit.ly/2ZvihKc 

Tom

============================================
Tom Johnson - [hidden email]
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
NM Foundation for Open Government
Check out It's The People's Data                 

============================================

Virus-free. www.avast.com

On Fri, Jul 3, 2020 at 1:29 AM Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

At one end of the spectrum there are the 5 big commercial publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. They only publish stuff their agents select to make a lot of money. There are also the big academic publishers like OUP, CUP, HUP and MIT Press, which preferably publish strictly peer-reviewed content from professors at Ivy League universities who made their PhD at the age of 20.

At the other end of the spectrum there are "predatory publishers" who publish anything you submit as long as you pay enough money for it. Open access books can also be very expensive. Publishing an "open access book" at De Gruyter for example costs up to 8000 $. You pay for it so that other people read it. It is basically some kind of advertising of your own work.

For my own new book I finally have an offer from a small publisher in Washington D.C. who is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. They are really small and offer 5% royalties. Should I accept this offer or wait for a better one? It is the only one from more than 25 publishers I have asked, and the publishers at the moment are flooded with submissions. :-/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/26/novel-writing-during-coronavirus-crisis-outbreak

-J.

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[doug carmichael]

meaningful thoughts, as opposed to evocations, seem to me to require senences.  How would you handle an issue like “The difference between math and dram in understanding each other?” with single words?

doug

On Jul 5, 2020, at 4:42 PM, David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Not good for me to do this, so let me try to be brief (never a thing I am good at).

0.  To repeat myself for the 100th time, of course if one structures conversations around writing down single words (“evolve”, “emergent”, “complexity") and arguing about what they _really_ mean, one can go on forever and happily never settle.  More complete sentences and operational definitions create a much more disappointing landscape, in which one can either reach an understanding, or reach a hard problem of insight for which one lacks a new idea, and either way the conversation does tend to end.  So one reboots with the one-word questions, re-opens the exploration phase, and tries another anneal.

On Jul 6, 2020, at 6:03 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

But this is useful. 

To put the question baldly, wtf is natural design, anyway, as a descriptive property.  

One can construe the question and its answer in many valid ways, and I only mean to say a specific thing about one of them; not to assert that is is better or only, just that it can be understood.

Natural design, interpreted descriptively, or causally, is among other things a distributional concept.  Basic commitments are these:

1. There is some sensible way to make a division of objects from environments.  It is not necessary to think of _the_ most naive way one might try to do this, and then fret that there are lots of cases it would get wrong; we have many tools for such divisions, and the ability to think precisely about many distinct kinds of relations.  But suppose there is some such division.  Animals are objects.  They might live on land or they might live in water.

2. Because there is a notion of factorability from 1, there are ways to talk about marginal distributions over the factors, and joint distributions over the combinations.  Animals might have lots of forms, which are variable properties _of_ them.  Environments can be described in terms of many properties, and particular classes of environments might have distributions of properties that are concentrated in one region or another of the values the properties can take.  With regard to “being a place to live”, the “land” environments are concentrated over where weight-bearing is a challenge; the water environments are concentrated over where resistance to relative motion is a challenge.

3. Starting conditions for some joint distribution on objects and their environments can be different from later conditions for the same pairs.  So animals that have history in one set of settings can find themselves spending more time in other settings.  They are still good at what they were doing before, but not necessarily at what they mostly spend their time doing now.  Scientists can experience this phenomenon too, most especially when they are put into managerial positions.

4. One can put forth various null hypotheses for what a joint distribution could be, including the product of marginal distributions drawn from other conditions.  A joint distribution _could_ look like a product of a marginal distribution over tortious-like or elephant-like animals that are good at weight-bearing, with a marginal distribution over deep-water environments where weight-bearing is not a problem to be solved, but surmounting resistance to motion is a problem.  Often we imagine that the starting conditions in 3 have this character.  This is the early output of using something in a new way (the “ex” part of “exaptation”) before selective dynamics has produced the “aptation” part.

5. Joint distributions can change with time (evolve in the dynamical systems sense) so that at late times they are different from the products of marginals that were the null model or the starting condition.  One can speak of “information flow” from regularities in the environment (the fact that its distribution is concentrated in one part of the parameter space and not in another), “into” the marginal on the object, reducing some relative entropy for that marginal distribution.  The descendant animals in a population can have attenuated traits good for weight-bearing, relative to the traits expressed by their ancestors, and can have enhanced traits for reducing resistance to relative motion.  The information flow is the same as repeated application of a Bayesian updating rule (see Cosma Shalizi and Andrew Gelman, Electronic Journal of Statistcs, in the appendix somewhere) though I think this result has been known since antiquity).  In that direction, it is the “aptation” of adaptation, exaptation, or whatever.  Of course, events reducing a relative entropy for the environment could also flow the other way.  Phytoplankton can change viscosity, oxygenation, light-penetration, etc., of their environment, and this is what the niche-construction and ecosystem-engineering guys go on about.  There probably is a Bayesian construction for that too.

6. Instead of talking about information “flow” from one marginal to the other, one can instead speak of the increase in “mutual information” as the difference of some relative entropy of the joint distribution from relative entropies of the marginals, and can characterize a degree of adaptation through the increase in that mutual information.  Mutual information can increase through either adaptation or environmental modification, so merely its increase does not report on a directionality.  Chris Adami in early papers liked to emphasize the mutual information approach, because it is the correct zeroth-order answer to facile versions of “Shannon information isn’t semantic information”.  Nihat Ay and collaborators have done a lot, instantiated in robotic problems, with notions of information flows.  Probably David Wolpert up at SFI could reel off 400 citations summarizing the leading 1% of activity in the field as of the last 24 hours, if asked.  There are some nice things to say about how to cut up systems and environments, and to talk about how each affects the other, which come out of recent “stochastic thermodynamics”, and which I will get back to trying to write up after I exit this email.  It’s all more or less elementary, though.

I guess everybody in the list already knows this, so Nick’s question “wtf is natural design” is meant to take up where the above leaves off.  I guess Nick means “after the above trivialities are all acknowledged, then what does the expression _really_ mean”.  But those questions are always hard for me to understand when expressed at the level of 4 words, if one hasn’t first solved as much with the trivialities as one can, and then been more explicit about what is left unsatisfying or unclear.  Those things tend to be in the eye of the beholder, and cannot readily be guessed if there isn’t a starting platform of using the trivialities to their fullest extent.

Then, however, I think we encounter Jochen’s and I guess Russ’s point about “everything and nothing” (a point I also routinely make).  The statistical formulation above is enough to show constructively that there is a thing to describe, that it is not tautological and that it can vary in degree, following which we can attach a name to that construction.  But how it is achieved mechanistically can be through endlessly variable relations.  

This is the sense in which Darwinism per se was never much of a scientific revolution, and was and unfortunately still is mostly a social revolution of trying to wrestle thoughts about life away from the vitalists.  The scientific advancement, even in Darwin’s work, seems to have been mostly in showing that one could get enough control over the relations for particular classes of cases, to make Bayesian updating a plausibly _useful_ explanation.

From there one can branch into sub-categories: how important is individuality and population structure, versus continua, etc.  How much does one get from the substrate (chemistry, code, cognitive events, social norms and institutions?), and what part of the potential for design derives from the substrate and not from the general-purpose filtering problem?

But, enough.  

Eric

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[Gary Schiltz-4]

No offense to the government of your country, but just because its courts have judged it to be legal, doesn't make it right. Of course "right" is a subjective, moral concept, and I hasten to add that morality is relative and personal. Additionally, I don't know how subject other countries are to the pronouncements of a particular country's judgments. I'll leave that to the United Nations. But in the case of copyrights, my own view of what is right is that the availability for copying of material should ideally be in the hands of the author. My two cents worth.

On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 7:11 PM Sarbajit Roy <[hidden email]> wrote:

I got your book from here
https://www.pdfdrive.com/interactive-computer-graphics-a-top-down-approach-with-webgl-edward-angel-and-dave-d38281420.html

The Indian judgment is clear, Reproduction is limited to a copy which the teacher/institute has LEGALLY purchased.

There are other judgments from the same court directing that thousands of infringing movie piracy websites (and their whack-a-mole clones) are blocked in India for copyright violation and harm caused to producers.

https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Utv_Software_Communication_Ltd._..._vs_1337X.To_And_Ors_on_10_April_2019-1.pdf

Sarbajit

On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 5:17 AM Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks but the story is more complex. 

What transpired is in retrospect somewhat amusing. I received an email from someone at a university that was using the book asking if I knew there was a ps file on the web of the whole book. I checked it out, contacted the instructor who had it taken down. I had no idea how anyone had obtained a perfect copy of the book. Even during copyediting, I never was given access to a final ps version with even the typesetting marks. My editor started a big investigation at Pearson to see who had violated security during production only to find out after weeks that the people at Pearson who dealt with accessibility issues were sending out the file to every school that adopted the book (at the time around 200 just in the US).

What is odd to me is that the last time I checked libgen.io, which was a while ago, the version there was not a ps version put a pdf in which you could use the TOC interactively so I figured it was the kindle version which my editor, who had become somewhat expert at this, showed me how easy it is to get the kindle version. Apparently what is the the situation now is that the ps version is libgen.is so someone else must have uploaded it.

The material on the Indian decision on respect to fair use was very interesting. I was familiar with the fair use policies in the U.S. and the U.K. In spirit, they are the same. However, the problem is not fair use but with sites like libgen, where anyone can upload a file irrespective of copyright or ownership  That file is then available worldwide to everyone. Consequently, the holders of the copyright have no protection at all other than some people having ethical issues with libgen. Sadly, I find many of my colleagues and students do not see this as an ethical issue. 

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 5, 2020, at 4:14 PM, Sarbajit Roy <[hidden email]> wrote:

Edward

The PDF of the 7th edition of your book being widely circulated was very likely not generated from its Kindle version, but from the Postscript version used to print your book. It was generated using Adobe Distiller 7+ for a Macintosh. Must have been cloned from one of those unwatermarked copies dished out by your publisher's marketing team to "potential" customers.

Sarbajit

On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 2:52 AM Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

I’ve been a book author since 1972 and a textbook author since 1989. My computer graphics textbook has been the most popular book in the area for 20 years and just came out in its eighth edition with various editions being available in Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Russian. Sadly, the book business has changed over that time; changed in way that is bad for almost everyone, especially authors. I think you’re faced with a lot of bad choices. I hope some of the following will prove helpful. And if not helpful, at least interesting.

Before I forget, you might enjoy reading of my adventures writing the first edition of my present textbook while on sabbatical in Venezuela, Ecuador, Hong Kong and Nepal. There’s a pointer to it on my home page www.cs.unm.edu/~angel 

When I had to pick a publisher, I knew the editors and  local book reps at Academic Press, Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall and Benjamin/Cummings. They dominated the CS field and did so largely because they had editors who knew the field, excellent book reps who knew the needs of the faculty and students, a willingness to invest in a book, and in-house production. None of these exist anymore and, as Tom pointed out, you're largely on your own. It’s unfortunate if you care about how many copies get sold and your royalties. I have many friends who self-published in the past. It’s a lot of work either way but I prefer to put my effort into content and not type-setting or marketing. None of my self-published friends have ever sold many books.

I had three excellent editors over 20 years. When I did my first edition, my editor hired a development editor at great expense to improve the quality of my writing. She worked with the CS faculty and grad students at Caltech and Stanford. It made a huge difference. Now almost none of these jobs exist within the publishers. All production is contracted out to the low bidders (art, typesetting, copy editing, etc) most of whom are in India. I no longer have an editor. There is one person working for the publusher with whom I communicate with to try to get things done correctly with the contractors. This last edition has been a long painful experience. 

So what happened? Books were always expensive for students, especially when sold through college bookstores. Then used book sellers appeared and Asian students started importing low cost Asian versions of the standard textbooks. Under US copyright laws, both are legal. The publishers responded by upping prices which reduced sales even more.

And then came electronic media. At first, my book, like most others, was still print-only. But the publisher sent perfect unwatermarked pdfs to all the schools what adopted the book for use by students with special needs. Wasn’t long before those pdfs made it to the Web. Then they had a electronic version and a kindle version that students could rent for a semester or year. The publisher, the largest in the business, was clueless about web security and had no idea that Kindles are not secure. Very quickly, the book appeared (with most of the other cs texts and various best sellers) on a Russian website as a “public service.” End of paid sales.

The new edition is only available in electronic form and the publisher claims it is only available on a secure site. I doubt anyone on this list believes that.

Although I never in the past had issues with the publisher having the copyright, which was pretty standard, I wish I had it now. Since there is no hope of making significant royalties now (we used), my coauthor and I would like to put the book out for free on our websites rather than having it appear on various illegal Russian sites known to most students.

Personally, I no longer care about royalties but the long term issue I worry about is why would any young person write a textbook. It’s a huge amount of work and usually not something that in the academic world is valued as highly as research papers and grant funding.

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 4, 2020, at 2:25 PM, Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks. Yes, self-publishing is an option. I am looking for an official publisher mainly for one reason, namely that other scientists and researchers can cite it, since I still cling to the illusion that someone would actually do it. Normally self-published texts are not considered as reliable or trustworthy sources. I didn't expect that finding a decent publisher would be so difficult. 

-J.

-------- Original message --------

From: Tom Johnson <[hidden email]>

Date: 7/4/20 20:10 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

Jochen:

The deal being offered strikes me as a bad deal.

Background:  I have been practicing and teaching about "Be Your Own Publisher" for nearly 15 years.  There are, in my opinion, some major problems with all publishers today.  It starts with control of the copyright.  I think YOU should want to maintain control of the copyright to your work.  It will depend on the contract, but many or most publishers will try to lock down the copyright in their favor for all -- ALL -- forms of your work in perpetuity and throughout the universe.  Sometimes quite literally.

Second, you should assume -- especially with a small publisher and you, not being as well known  as Stephen King or Daniel Steele  -- the publisher will do little if anything to promote your book beyond a mention in its catalog and, maybe, some promotional links on Amazon.  Given that, a 5 percent royalty should be seen as a con.

Third, given your computing experience, you should find it easy to format and produce the book yourself.  I have used Lulu.com for years.  It is especially good if you want to have both hardback, paperback and PDF editions.  Again the advantages: you keep the copyright, you can set (and change) the prices and to a degree the royalties.  Also, Lulu and Amazon handle all the backend financial arrangements and administration and pay directly and quickly.  I also use a very good, high quality digital printer in Albuquerque for paperback editions.  It is Lithexcel.  It handles all the printing (one copy to any number) quickly, along with all the fulfillment and accounting. The folks there will also, for only $25, set up your book in the Amazon inventory search engine.  Finally, there is Amazon's self-publishing arm.  While Amazon might take a bigger slice, the control over all aspects is in your hands.

Here's the problem/challenge with all of these.  YOU have to do the marketing/publicity/promotion.  But so what?  If you today sign with any publisher of any size you will have to do the same thing.

Hope this helps.  Feel free to contact me with questions.  Also you might want to see https://bit.ly/2ZvihKc 

Tom

============================================
Tom Johnson - [hidden email]
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
NM Foundation for Open Government
Check out It's The People's Data                 

============================================

Virus-free. www.avast.com

On Fri, Jul 3, 2020 at 1:29 AM Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

At one end of the spectrum there are the 5 big commercial publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. They only publish stuff their agents select to make a lot of money. There are also the big academic publishers like OUP, CUP, HUP and MIT Press, which preferably publish strictly peer-reviewed content from professors at Ivy League universities who made their PhD at the age of 20.

At the other end of the spectrum there are "predatory publishers" who publish anything you submit as long as you pay enough money for it. Open access books can also be very expensive. Publishing an "open access book" at De Gruyter for example costs up to 8000 $. You pay for it so that other people read it. It is basically some kind of advertising of your own work.

For my own new book I finally have an offer from a small publisher in Washington D.C. who is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. They are really small and offer 5% royalties. Should I accept this offer or wait for a better one? It is the only one from more than 25 publishers I have asked, and the publishers at the moment are flooded with submissions. :-/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/26/novel-writing-during-coronavirus-crisis-outbreak

-J.

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[thompnickson2]

Oh by the way,  if I remember correctly, one of the fundamental obligations of a publisher is to defend infringements of copyright.  Thus, if they fail in this obligation, copyright, FWIW, reverts to the author, no?

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Edward Angel
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 5:48 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

 

Thanks but the story is more complex. 

 

What transpired is in retrospect somewhat amusing. I received an email from someone at a university that was using the book asking if I knew there was a ps file on the web of the whole book. I checked it out, contacted the instructor who had it taken down. I had no idea how anyone had obtained a perfect copy of the book. Even during copyediting, I never was given access to a final ps version with even the typesetting marks. My editor started a big investigation at Pearson to see who had violated security during production only to find out after weeks that the people at Pearson who dealt with accessibility issues were sending out the file to every school that adopted the book (at the time around 200 just in the US).

 

What is odd to me is that the last time I checked libgen.io, which was a while ago, the version there was not a ps version put a pdf in which you could use the TOC interactively so I figured it was the kindle version which my editor, who had become somewhat expert at this, showed me how easy it is to get the kindle version. Apparently what is the the situation now is that the ps version is libgen.is so someone else must have uploaded it.

 

The material on the Indian decision on respect to fair use was very interesting. I was familiar with the fair use policies in the U.S. and the U.K. In spirit, they are the same. However, the problem is not fair use but with sites like libgen, where anyone can upload a file irrespective of copyright or ownership  That file is then available worldwide to everyone. Consequently, the holders of the copyright have no protection at all other than some people having ethical issues with libgen. Sadly, I find many of my colleagues and students do not see this as an ethical issue. 

 

Ed

 

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)                         [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)                                        http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 5, 2020, at 4:14 PM, Sarbajit Roy <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Edward

The PDF of the 7th edition of your book being widely circulated was very likely not generated from its Kindle version, but from the Postscript version used to print your book. It was generated using Adobe Distiller 7+ for a Macintosh. Must have been cloned from one of those unwatermarked copies dished out by your publisher's marketing team to "potential" customers.

 

Sarbajit

On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 2:52 AM Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

I’ve been a book author since 1972 and a textbook author since 1989. My computer graphics textbook has been the most popular book in the area for 20 years and just came out in its eighth edition with various editions being available in Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Russian. Sadly, the book business has changed over that time; changed in way that is bad for almost everyone, especially authors. I think you’re faced with a lot of bad choices. I hope some of the following will prove helpful. And if not helpful, at least interesting.

 

Before I forget, you might enjoy reading of my adventures writing the first edition of my present textbook while on sabbatical in Venezuela, Ecuador, Hong Kong and Nepal. There’s a pointer to it on my home page www.cs.unm.edu/~angel 

 

When I had to pick a publisher, I knew the editors and  local book reps at Academic Press, Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall and Benjamin/Cummings. They dominated the CS field and did so largely because they had editors who knew the field, excellent book reps who knew the needs of the faculty and students, a willingness to invest in a book, and in-house production. None of these exist anymore and, as Tom pointed out, you're largely on your own. It’s unfortunate if you care about how many copies get sold and your royalties. I have many friends who self-published in the past. It’s a lot of work either way but I prefer to put my effort into content and not type-setting or marketing. None of my self-published friends have ever sold many books.

 

I had three excellent editors over 20 years. When I did my first edition, my editor hired a development editor at great expense to improve the quality of my writing. She worked with the CS faculty and grad students at Caltech and Stanford. It made a huge difference. Now almost none of these jobs exist within the publishers. All production is contracted out to the low bidders (art, typesetting, copy editing, etc) most of whom are in India. I no longer have an editor. There is one person working for the publusher with whom I communicate with to try to get things done correctly with the contractors. This last edition has been a long painful experience. 

 

So what happened? Books were always expensive for students, especially when sold through college bookstores. Then used book sellers appeared and Asian students started importing low cost Asian versions of the standard textbooks. Under US copyright laws, both are legal. The publishers responded by upping prices which reduced sales even more.

 

And then came electronic media. At first, my book, like most others, was still print-only. But the publisher sent perfect unwatermarked pdfs to all the schools what adopted the book for use by students with special needs. Wasn’t long before those pdfs made it to the Web. Then they had a electronic version and a kindle version that students could rent for a semester or year. The publisher, the largest in the business, was clueless about web security and had no idea that Kindles are not secure. Very quickly, the book appeared (with most of the other cs texts and various best sellers) on a Russian website as a “public service.” End of paid sales.

 

The new edition is only available in electronic form and the publisher claims it is only available on a secure site. I doubt anyone on this list believes that.

 

Although I never in the past had issues with the publisher having the copyright, which was pretty standard, I wish I had it now. Since there is no hope of making significant royalties now (we used), my coauthor and I would like to put the book out for free on our websites rather than having it appear on various illegal Russian sites known to most students.

 

Personally, I no longer care about royalties but the long term issue I worry about is why would any young person write a textbook. It’s a huge amount of work and usually not something that in the academic world is valued as highly as research papers and grant funding.

 

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 4, 2020, at 2:25 PM, Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Thanks. Yes, self-publishing is an option. I am looking for an official publisher mainly for one reason, namely that other scientists and researchers can cite it, since I still cling to the illusion that someone would actually do it. Normally self-published texts are not considered as reliable or trustworthy sources. I didn't expect that finding a decent publisher would be so difficult. 

 

-J.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Tom Johnson <[hidden email]>

Date: 7/4/20 20:10 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

 

Jochen:

The deal being offered strikes me as a bad deal.

 

Background:  I have been practicing and teaching about "Be Your Own Publisher" for nearly 15 years.  There are, in my opinion, some major problems with all publishers today.  It starts with control of the copyright.  I think YOU should want to maintain control of the copyright to your work.  It will depend on the contract, but many or most publishers will try to lock down the copyright in their favor for all -- ALL -- forms of your work in perpetuity and throughout the universe.  Sometimes quite literally.

 

Second, you should assume -- especially with a small publisher and you, not being as well known  as Stephen King or Daniel Steele  -- the publisher will do little if anything to promote your book beyond a mention in its catalog and, maybe, some promotional links on Amazon.  Given that, a 5 percent royalty should be seen as a con.

 

Third, given your computing experience, you should find it easy to format and produce the book yourself.  I have used Lulu.com for years.  It is especially good if you want to have both hardback, paperback and PDF editions.  Again the advantages: you keep the copyright, you can set (and change) the prices and to a degree the royalties.  Also, Lulu and Amazon handle all the backend financial arrangements and administration and pay directly and quickly.  I also use a very good, high quality digital printer in Albuquerque for paperback editions.  It is Lithexcel.  It handles all the printing (one copy to any number) quickly, along with all the fulfillment and accounting. The folks there will also, for only $25, set up your book in the Amazon inventory search engine.  Finally, there is Amazon's self-publishing arm.  While Amazon might take a bigger slice, the control over all aspects is in your hands.

 

Here's the problem/challenge with all of these.  YOU have to do the marketing/publicity/promotion.  But so what?  If you today sign with any publisher of any size you will have to do the same thing.

 

Hope this helps.  Feel free to contact me with questions.  Also you might want to see https://bit.ly/2ZvihKc 

Tom

============================================
Tom Johnson - [hidden email]
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
NM Foundation for Open Government
Check out It's The People's Data                 

============================================

 

 

Virus-free. www.avast.com

 

On Fri, Jul 3, 2020 at 1:29 AM Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

At one end of the spectrum there are the 5 big commercial publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. They only publish stuff their agents select to make a lot of money. There are also the big academic publishers like OUP, CUP, HUP and MIT Press, which preferably publish strictly peer-reviewed content from professors at Ivy League universities who made their PhD at the age of 20.

At the other end of the spectrum there are "predatory publishers" who publish anything you submit as long as you pay enough money for it. Open access books can also be very expensive. Publishing an "open access book" at De Gruyter for example costs up to 8000 $. You pay for it so that other people read it. It is basically some kind of advertising of your own work.

For my own new book I finally have an offer from a small publisher in Washington D.C. who is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. They are really small and offer 5% royalties. Should I accept this offer or wait for a better one? It is the only one from more than 25 publishers I have asked, and the publishers at the moment are flooded with submissions. :-/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/26/novel-writing-during-coronavirus-crisis-outbreak

 

-J.

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[thompnickson2]

Thanks, Marcus.  I think we are on the same page. N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 6:01 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

Hi Nick,

 

I’m attempting to identify another use of the word evolve that you will accept as valid, nothing more.

In computational phylogenetics, one typically uses an error distribution (which arises from biochemistry) to estimate distance between different DNA sequences.   The probabilities of adenine changing into guanine, to cytosine, or to thymine, of guanine changing into cytosine or thymine, and of cytosine changing into thymine.  This symmetrical matrix serves as a sort of clock.

 

One assumes that it is the exception, not the rule, that mutations arise from environmental pressure.   With these assumptions (and sufficiently long sequences), one can place some individual contemporary organisms as closer and others as farther away in evolution distance, or time.   The task is to find the most likely ancestral sequences.   The evolution of which I speak is process of iterating a probabilistic model such that one sequence of inferred ancestral DNA iteratively morphs (evolves), site-by-site, into an observed sequence of DNA.    This definition has nothing to do with adaptation, other than it can be used to quantify when unusual things happen.

 

Marcus

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Sunday, July 5, 2020 at 2:03 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

Sorry.  I may not be worth your effort, here.  I just don’t understand what you said.

 

Let it be the case that as we examine the history of species, there are repeated (and therefore predictable) pathways through which they pass.  A lineage of any sort, entering the water at some historical stage becomes more streamlined, let’s say.  Because streamlining is characteristic of creatures that move through water, we say that any such lineage has adapted to life in water.   Thus, in my way of thinking, to evolve [phylogenetically]in this case is to become more like creatures that move through water.   I have never been entirely clear what this additional constraint, ADAPTED phyletic descent, constitutes.  I have been writing for many years, and I have been challenged on many points, but nobody has challenged me on this one, To put the question baldly, wtf is natural design, anyway, as a descriptive property.  Please don’t answer that design is, whatever designers produce, because that is an example of a tethered description, and leaves us with nothing to say about the good that ‘designers” produce in the world.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology                                                                                                                                       

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 2:49 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

A matrix exponential proceeds toward an equilibrium state.  

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Sunday, July 5, 2020 at 1:47 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

So, phylogenetic evolution is evolution that proceeds toward adaptation.  How would a state theorist characterize that constraint?

 

n

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 2:37 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

Yes, phylogenetic evolution is often modeled using a matrix exponential.

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Sunday, July 5, 2020 at 1:35 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

Marcus,

 

So in your sense, a system evolves if it passes along a predictable pathway from state to state.   I wonder if phylogenetic evolution is a special case of yours.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 1:19 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

“Evolve” in this sense:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamical_system

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Sunday, July 5, 2020 at 9:47 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

Jochen,

 

FOOD FIGHT!  FOOD FIGHT!  I absolutely and totally disagree that “everything evolves” [while agreeing that anything that is everything is nothing].  Rocks and tornadoes do not evolve.  They change, but the don’t evolve.  Evolution (to me) is a very specific pattern of design arising through phylogenetic descent – lineages being bent through time to match their circumstances.  I am not entirely sure that some inanimate things don’t evolve.  I would have a hard time arguing ferociously that the sorting of pebbles on a beach is not the result of some sort of evolution.  I certainly don’t want to define evolution as something that only organisms can do, if only because that turns the assertion, “only organisms evolve” into a nothing, or an everything, depending on how you care to look at it

 

In this matter, as in all matters, Eric will correct me.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 4:47 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

Russ, I agree. Maybe we found it already, the theory of everything & nothing: Darwin's theory of evolution. It is a theory of everything because everything evolves. It doesn't say anything how fish, insects, dinosaurs, mammals, birds, religions, civilizations, companies, parties or states look like, though. Therefore it is also a theory of nothing. I have to reread your book.

https://www.hpcoders.com.au/nothing.html

 

-J.

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Russell Standish <[hidden email]>

Date: 7/5/20 11:49 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

 

Being self-published hasn't stopped my book "Theory of Nothing" from
being cited. According to Google Scholar, it has 22 citations, 9th on
my list in terms of citation count, just after "Why Occams Razor", a
peer reviewed paper on similar topics. It got a bit of a boost from
Max Tegmark's book, as he singled it out as inspiration, kind of ironic when it
was one of Max's "crazy papers" that inspired me to write "Why Occams
Razor" and then "Theory of Nothing".

I think you need to have a reason to publish a book. Making money is
not one them - almost nobody makes money from writing books. Vanity
publications ("it looks good on the CV") is another one to avoid. Best
bet is if you have a story or a topic that needs telling, and you
think would be interesting to other people, then go for it. Marketing
then becomes telling other people about it, advancing arguments from
it in fora like this. With a bit of luck, it goes viral.

One good reason for writing academic books is that it gives you
expanded scope to explain your ideas more fully, and in less
technically forbidding terms. Allows you to expand your readership
beyond the narrow circle reading your peer revieed articles. But you
probably want those peer reviewed articles to back up/draw upon your
book work. That's probably the reason why old academics write books,
and young ones write papers.

In my case, I've self-published 3 books so far: "Theory of Nothing",
which has sold over 1000 copies, and perhaps 2-3 times as many free
downloads from my website and the usual pirate websites, but in no way
does the royalties cover the time I put into it (unless being paid
less than a Calcutta rickshaw driver was a career ambition); "Amoeba's
Secret", a translation of a semi-autobiography by Bruno Marchal, which
was about the clearest exposition he gave of his ideas, and "Magic
Cottage", an Anthology of my son's writing, which was quite exquisite,
and sadly something he's not really doing now. Magic Cottage proved to
be more of a vanity publication than I thought it would be - but
partly because he never took up my suggestion of leaving a copy around
his college room, now apartment, where it could act as a conversation
starter. I also envisaged him using the book when going for jobs that
might require writing skills, but it seems he hasn't needed to do that
to date.


Cheers

On Sat, Jul 04, 2020 at 10:25:03PM +0200, Jochen Fromm wrote:

> Thanks. Yes, self-publishing is an option. I am looking for an official
> publisher mainly for one reason, namely that other scientists and researchers
> can cite it, since I still cling to the illusion that someone would actually do
> it. Normally self-published texts are not considered as reliable or trustworthy
> sources. I didn't expect that finding a decent publisher would be so
> difficult.
>
> -J.
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Tom Johnson <[hidden email]>
> Date: 7/4/20 20:10 (GMT+01:00)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed
>
> Jochen:
> The deal being offered strikes me as a bad deal.
>
> Background:  I have been practicing and teaching about "Be Your Own Publisher"
> for nearly 15 years.  There are, in my opinion, some major problems with all
> publishers today.  It starts with control of the copyright.  I think YOU should
> want to maintain control of the copyright to your work.  It will depend on the
> contract, but many or most publishers will try to lock down the copyright in
> their favor for all -- ALL -- forms of your work in perpetuity and throughout
> the universe.  Sometimes quite literally.
>
> Second, you should assume -- especially with a small publisher and you, not
> being as well known  as Stephen King or Daniel Steele  -- the publisher will do
> little if anything to promote your book beyond a mention in its catalog and,
> maybe, some promotional links on Amazon.  Given that, a 5 percent royalty
> should be seen as a con.
>
> Third, given your computing experience, you should find it easy to format and
> produce the book yourself.  I have used Lulu.com for years.  It is especially
> good if you want to have both hardback, paperback and PDF editions.  Again the
> advantages: you keep the copyright, you can set (and change) the prices and to
> a degree the royalties.  Also, Lulu and Amazon handle all the backend financial
> arrangements and administration and pay directly and quickly.  I also use a
> very good, high quality digital printer in Albuquerque for paperback editions.
> It is Lithexcel.  It handles all the printing (one copy to any number) quickly,
> along with all the fulfillment and accounting. The folks there will also, for
> only $25, set up your book in the Amazon inventory search engine.  Finally,
> there is Amazon's self-publishing arm.  While Amazon might take a bigger slice,
> the control over all aspects is in your hands.
>
> Here's the problem/challenge with all of these.  YOU have to do the marketing/
> publicity/promotion.  But so what?  If you today sign with any publisher of any
> size you will have to do the same thing.
>
> Hope this helps.  Feel free to contact me with questions.  Also you might want
> to see https://bit.ly/2ZvihKc
> Tom
>
> ============================================
> Tom Johnson - [hidden email]
> Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
> 505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
> NM Foundation for Open Government
> Check out It's The People's Data                
> ============================================
>
>
>
> [icon-] Virus-free. www.avast.com
>
> 
>
> On Fri, Jul 3, 2020 at 1:29 AM Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>     At one end of the spectrum there are the 5 big commercial publishers
>     Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon &
>     Schuster. They only publish stuff their agents select to make a lot of
>     money. There are also the big academic publishers like OUP, CUP, HUP and
>     MIT Press, which preferably publish strictly peer-reviewed content from
>     professors at Ivy League universities who made their PhD at the age of 20.
>
>     At the other end of the spectrum there are "predatory publishers" who
>     publish anything you submit as long as you pay enough money for it. Open
>     access books can also be very expensive. Publishing an "open access book"
>     at De Gruyter for example costs up to 8000 $. You pay for it so that other
>     people read it. It is basically some kind of advertising of your own work.
>
>     For my own new book I finally have an offer from a small publisher in
>     Washington D.C. who is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. They are
>     really small and offer 5% royalties. Should I accept this offer or wait for
>     a better one? It is the only one from more than 25 publishers I have asked,
>     and the publishers at the moment are flooded with submissions. :-/
>     https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/26/
>     novel-writing-during-coronavirus-crisis-outbreak
>
>     -J.
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>

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--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Russell Standish                    Phone [phone] (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders     [hidden email]
                      http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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[Tom Johnson]

And who among us will hire the lawyers to press this case?

T

On Sun, Jul 5, 2020, 10:11 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Oh by the way,  if I remember correctly, one of the fundamental obligations of a publisher is to defend infringements of copyright.  Thus, if they fail in this obligation, copyright, FWIW, reverts to the author, no?

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Edward Angel
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 5:48 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

 

Thanks but the story is more complex. 

 

What transpired is in retrospect somewhat amusing. I received an email from someone at a university that was using the book asking if I knew there was a ps file on the web of the whole book. I checked it out, contacted the instructor who had it taken down. I had no idea how anyone had obtained a perfect copy of the book. Even during copyediting, I never was given access to a final ps version with even the typesetting marks. My editor started a big investigation at Pearson to see who had violated security during production only to find out after weeks that the people at Pearson who dealt with accessibility issues were sending out the file to every school that adopted the book (at the time around 200 just in the US).

 

What is odd to me is that the last time I checked libgen.io, which was a while ago, the version there was not a ps version put a pdf in which you could use the TOC interactively so I figured it was the kindle version which my editor, who had become somewhat expert at this, showed me how easy it is to get the kindle version. Apparently what is the the situation now is that the ps version is libgen.is so someone else must have uploaded it.

 

The material on the Indian decision on respect to fair use was very interesting. I was familiar with the fair use policies in the U.S. and the U.K. In spirit, they are the same. However, the problem is not fair use but with sites like libgen, where anyone can upload a file irrespective of copyright or ownership  That file is then available worldwide to everyone. Consequently, the holders of the copyright have no protection at all other than some people having ethical issues with libgen. Sadly, I find many of my colleagues and students do not see this as an ethical issue. 

 

Ed

 

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)                         [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)                                        http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 5, 2020, at 4:14 PM, Sarbajit Roy <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Edward

The PDF of the 7th edition of your book being widely circulated was very likely not generated from its Kindle version, but from the Postscript version used to print your book. It was generated using Adobe Distiller 7+ for a Macintosh. Must have been cloned from one of those unwatermarked copies dished out by your publisher's marketing team to "potential" customers.

 

Sarbajit

On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 2:52 AM Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

I’ve been a book author since 1972 and a textbook author since 1989. My computer graphics textbook has been the most popular book in the area for 20 years and just came out in its eighth edition with various editions being available in Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Russian. Sadly, the book business has changed over that time; changed in way that is bad for almost everyone, especially authors. I think you’re faced with a lot of bad choices. I hope some of the following will prove helpful. And if not helpful, at least interesting.

 

Before I forget, you might enjoy reading of my adventures writing the first edition of my present textbook while on sabbatical in Venezuela, Ecuador, Hong Kong and Nepal. There’s a pointer to it on my home page www.cs.unm.edu/~angel 

 

When I had to pick a publisher, I knew the editors and  local book reps at Academic Press, Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall and Benjamin/Cummings. They dominated the CS field and did so largely because they had editors who knew the field, excellent book reps who knew the needs of the faculty and students, a willingness to invest in a book, and in-house production. None of these exist anymore and, as Tom pointed out, you're largely on your own. It’s unfortunate if you care about how many copies get sold and your royalties. I have many friends who self-published in the past. It’s a lot of work either way but I prefer to put my effort into content and not type-setting or marketing. None of my self-published friends have ever sold many books.

 

I had three excellent editors over 20 years. When I did my first edition, my editor hired a development editor at great expense to improve the quality of my writing. She worked with the CS faculty and grad students at Caltech and Stanford. It made a huge difference. Now almost none of these jobs exist within the publishers. All production is contracted out to the low bidders (art, typesetting, copy editing, etc) most of whom are in India. I no longer have an editor. There is one person working for the publusher with whom I communicate with to try to get things done correctly with the contractors. This last edition has been a long painful experience. 

 

So what happened? Books were always expensive for students, especially when sold through college bookstores. Then used book sellers appeared and Asian students started importing low cost Asian versions of the standard textbooks. Under US copyright laws, both are legal. The publishers responded by upping prices which reduced sales even more.

 

And then came electronic media. At first, my book, like most others, was still print-only. But the publisher sent perfect unwatermarked pdfs to all the schools what adopted the book for use by students with special needs. Wasn’t long before those pdfs made it to the Web. Then they had a electronic version and a kindle version that students could rent for a semester or year. The publisher, the largest in the business, was clueless about web security and had no idea that Kindles are not secure. Very quickly, the book appeared (with most of the other cs texts and various best sellers) on a Russian website as a “public service.” End of paid sales.

 

The new edition is only available in electronic form and the publisher claims it is only available on a secure site. I doubt anyone on this list believes that.

 

Although I never in the past had issues with the publisher having the copyright, which was pretty standard, I wish I had it now. Since there is no hope of making significant royalties now (we used), my coauthor and I would like to put the book out for free on our websites rather than having it appear on various illegal Russian sites known to most students.

 

Personally, I no longer care about royalties but the long term issue I worry about is why would any young person write a textbook. It’s a huge amount of work and usually not something that in the academic world is valued as highly as research papers and grant funding.

 

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 4, 2020, at 2:25 PM, Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Thanks. Yes, self-publishing is an option. I am looking for an official publisher mainly for one reason, namely that other scientists and researchers can cite it, since I still cling to the illusion that someone would actually do it. Normally self-published texts are not considered as reliable or trustworthy sources. I didn't expect that finding a decent publisher would be so difficult. 

 

-J.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Tom Johnson <[hidden email]>

Date: 7/4/20 20:10 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

 

Jochen:

The deal being offered strikes me as a bad deal.

 

Background:  I have been practicing and teaching about "Be Your Own Publisher" for nearly 15 years.  There are, in my opinion, some major problems with all publishers today.  It starts with control of the copyright.  I think YOU should want to maintain control of the copyright to your work.  It will depend on the contract, but many or most publishers will try to lock down the copyright in their favor for all -- ALL -- forms of your work in perpetuity and throughout the universe.  Sometimes quite literally.

 

Second, you should assume -- especially with a small publisher and you, not being as well known  as Stephen King or Daniel Steele  -- the publisher will do little if anything to promote your book beyond a mention in its catalog and, maybe, some promotional links on Amazon.  Given that, a 5 percent royalty should be seen as a con.

 

Third, given your computing experience, you should find it easy to format and produce the book yourself.  I have used Lulu.com for years.  It is especially good if you want to have both hardback, paperback and PDF editions.  Again the advantages: you keep the copyright, you can set (and change) the prices and to a degree the royalties.  Also, Lulu and Amazon handle all the backend financial arrangements and administration and pay directly and quickly.  I also use a very good, high quality digital printer in Albuquerque for paperback editions.  It is Lithexcel.  It handles all the printing (one copy to any number) quickly, along with all the fulfillment and accounting. The folks there will also, for only $25, set up your book in the Amazon inventory search engine.  Finally, there is Amazon's self-publishing arm.  While Amazon might take a bigger slice, the control over all aspects is in your hands.

 

Here's the problem/challenge with all of these.  YOU have to do the marketing/publicity/promotion.  But so what?  If you today sign with any publisher of any size you will have to do the same thing.

 

Hope this helps.  Feel free to contact me with questions.  Also you might want to see https://bit.ly/2ZvihKc 

Tom

============================================
Tom Johnson - [hidden email]
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
NM Foundation for Open Government
Check out It's The People's Data                 

============================================

 

 

Virus-free. www.avast.com

 

On Fri, Jul 3, 2020 at 1:29 AM Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

At one end of the spectrum there are the 5 big commercial publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. They only publish stuff their agents select to make a lot of money. There are also the big academic publishers like OUP, CUP, HUP and MIT Press, which preferably publish strictly peer-reviewed content from professors at Ivy League universities who made their PhD at the age of 20.

At the other end of the spectrum there are "predatory publishers" who publish anything you submit as long as you pay enough money for it. Open access books can also be very expensive. Publishing an "open access book" at De Gruyter for example costs up to 8000 $. You pay for it so that other people read it. It is basically some kind of advertising of your own work.

For my own new book I finally have an offer from a small publisher in Washington D.C. who is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. They are really small and offer 5% royalties. Should I accept this offer or wait for a better one? It is the only one from more than 25 publishers I have asked, and the publishers at the moment are flooded with submissions. :-/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/26/novel-writing-during-coronavirus-crisis-outbreak

 

-J.

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[thompnickson2]

Eric,

 

Ok. So I have read your post and, while I still don’t understand everything you write, you seem to understand my question precisely and answer it voluminously.  We know what natural design is and it is a property of the relation between things and their environments, which individual organisms can instantiate but not by themselves exhibit.   To be humiliatingly honest, I had no awareness of the literature that you cite when I asked the question.  Nor, given the highly technical nature of that literature do I imagine I ever will. 

 

So, I have simply to put myself at your mercy and ask, Has anybody used that concept of natural design predictively? If I understand Darwin’s theory correctly, it asserts that better designed organisms should have more offspring than those less well designed.   

 

How does such an understanding of natural design handle such phenomena as the grossly hypertrophied plumage of some birds, or the extraordinary masculinized genitalia of the female spotted hyena, etc.  Are these instances of bad design?  I am hoping that the answer is yes, because they certainly seem like bad designs to me.  Thus, the contrary, that natural selection always produces natural design, is not validated and we need additional constructs if we are to accurately predict what natural selection produces. 

 

Thanks, as always, for your taking the time.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 5:42 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

Not good for me to do this, so let me try to be brief (never a thing I am good at).

 

0.  To repeat myself for the 100th time, of course if one structures conversations around writing down single words (“evolve”, “emergent”, “complexity") and arguing about what they _really_ mean, one can go on forever and happily never settle.  More complete sentences and operational definitions create a much more disappointing landscape, in which one can either reach an understanding, or reach a hard problem of insight for which one lacks a new idea, and either way the conversation does tend to end.  So one reboots with the one-word questions, re-opens the exploration phase, and tries another anneal.

 

On Jul 6, 2020, at 6:03 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

But this is useful. 

To put the question baldly, wtf is natural design, anyway, as a descriptive property. 

 

One can construe the question and its answer in many valid ways, and I only mean to say a specific thing about one of them; not to assert that is is better or only, just that it can be understood.

 

Natural design, interpreted descriptively, or causally, is among other things a distributional concept.  Basic commitments are these:

 

1. There is some sensible way to make a division of objects from environments.  It is not necessary to think of _the_ most naive way one might try to do this, and then fret that there are lots of cases it would get wrong; we have many tools for such divisions, and the ability to think precisely about many distinct kinds of relations.  But suppose there is some such division.  Animals are objects.  They might live on land or they might live in water.

 

2. Because there is a notion of factorability from 1, there are ways to talk about marginal distributions over the factors, and joint distributions over the combinations.  Animals might have lots of forms, which are variable properties _of_ them.  Environments can be described in terms of many properties, and particular classes of environments might have distributions of properties that are concentrated in one region or another of the values the properties can take.  With regard to “being a place to live”, the “land” environments are concentrated over where weight-bearing is a challenge; the water environments are concentrated over where resistance to relative motion is a challenge.

 

3. Starting conditions for some joint distribution on objects and their environments can be different from later conditions for the same pairs.  So animals that have history in one set of settings can find themselves spending more time in other settings.  They are still good at what they were doing before, but not necessarily at what they mostly spend their time doing now.  Scientists can experience this phenomenon too, most especially when they are put into managerial positions.

 

4. One can put forth various null hypotheses for what a joint distribution could be, including the product of marginal distributions drawn from other conditions.  A joint distribution _could_ look like a product of a marginal distribution over tortious-like or elephant-like animals that are good at weight-bearing, with a marginal distribution over deep-water environments where weight-bearing is not a problem to be solved, but surmounting resistance to motion is a problem.  Often we imagine that the starting conditions in 3 have this character.  This is the early output of using something in a new way (the “ex” part of “exaptation”) before selective dynamics has produced the “aptation” part.

 

5. Joint distributions can change with time (evolve in the dynamical systems sense) so that at late times they are different from the products of marginals that were the null model or the starting condition.  One can speak of “information flow” from regularities in the environment (the fact that its distribution is concentrated in one part of the parameter space and not in another), “into” the marginal on the object, reducing some relative entropy for that marginal distribution.  The descendant animals in a population can have attenuated traits good for weight-bearing, relative to the traits expressed by their ancestors, and can have enhanced traits for reducing resistance to relative motion.  The information flow is the same as repeated application of a Bayesian updating rule (see Cosma Shalizi and Andrew Gelman, Electronic Journal of Statistcs, in the appendix somewhere) though I think this result has been known since antiquity).  In that direction, it is the “aptation” of adaptation, exaptation, or whatever.  Of course, events reducing a relative entropy for the environment could also flow the other way.  Phytoplankton can change viscosity, oxygenation, light-penetration, etc., of their environment, and this is what the niche-construction and ecosystem-engineering guys go on about.  There probably is a Bayesian construction for that too.

 

6. Instead of talking about information “flow” from one marginal to the other, one can instead speak of the increase in “mutual information” as the difference of some relative entropy of the joint distribution from relative entropies of the marginals, and can characterize a degree of adaptation through the increase in that mutual information.  Mutual information can increase through either adaptation or environmental modification, so merely its increase does not report on a directionality.  Chris Adami in early papers liked to emphasize the mutual information approach, because it is the correct zeroth-order answer to facile versions of “Shannon information isn’t semantic information”.  Nihat Ay and collaborators have done a lot, instantiated in robotic problems, with notions of information flows.  Probably David Wolpert up at SFI could reel off 400 citations summarizing the leading 1% of activity in the field as of the last 24 hours, if asked.  There are some nice things to say about how to cut up systems and environments, and to talk about how each affects the other, which come out of recent “stochastic thermodynamics”, and which I will get back to trying to write up after I exit this email.  It’s all more or less elementary, though.

 

 

I guess everybody in the list already knows this, so Nick’s question “wtf is natural design” is meant to take up where the above leaves off.  I guess Nick means “after the above trivialities are all acknowledged, then what does the expression _really_ mean”.  But those questions are always hard for me to understand when expressed at the level of 4 words, if one hasn’t first solved as much with the trivialities as one can, and then been more explicit about what is left unsatisfying or unclear.  Those things tend to be in the eye of the beholder, and cannot readily be guessed if there isn’t a starting platform of using the trivialities to their fullest extent.

 

Then, however, I think we encounter Jochen’s and I guess Russ’s point about “everything and nothing” (a point I also routinely make).  The statistical formulation above is enough to show constructively that there is a thing to describe, that it is not tautological and that it can vary in degree, following which we can attach a name to that construction.  But how it is achieved mechanistically can be through endlessly variable relations.  

 

This is the sense in which Darwinism per se was never much of a scientific revolution, and was and unfortunately still is mostly a social revolution of trying to wrestle thoughts about life away from the vitalists.  The scientific advancement, even in Darwin’s work, seems to have been mostly in showing that one could get enough control over the relations for particular classes of cases, to make Bayesian updating a plausibly _useful_ explanation.

 

From there one can branch into sub-categories: how important is individuality and population structure, versus continua, etc.  How much does one get from the substrate (chemistry, code, cognitive events, social norms and institutions?), and what part of the potential for design derives from the substrate and not from the general-purpose filtering problem?

 

But, enough.  

 

Eric

 

 

 

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 5:42 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

Not good for me to do this, so let me try to be brief (never a thing I am good at).

 

0.  To repeat myself for the 100th time, of course if one structures conversations around writing down single words (“evolve”, “emergent”, “complexity") and arguing about what they _really_ mean, one can go on forever and happily never settle.  More complete sentences and operational definitions create a much more disappointing landscape, in which one can either reach an understanding, or reach a hard problem of insight for which one lacks a new idea, and either way the conversation does tend to end.  So one reboots with the one-word questions, re-opens the exploration phase, and tries another anneal.

 

On Jul 6, 2020, at 6:03 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

But this is useful. 

To put the question baldly, wtf is natural design, anyway, as a descriptive property. 

 

One can construe the question and its answer in many valid ways, and I only mean to say a specific thing about one of them; not to assert that is is better or only, just that it can be understood.

 

Natural design, interpreted descriptively, or causally, is among other things a distributional concept.  Basic commitments are these:

 

1. There is some sensible way to make a division of objects from environments.  It is not necessary to think of _the_ most naive way one might try to do this, and then fret that there are lots of cases it would get wrong; we have many tools for such divisions, and the ability to think precisely about many distinct kinds of relations.  But suppose there is some such division.  Animals are objects.  They might live on land or they might live in water.

 

2. Because there is a notion of factorability from 1, there are ways to talk about marginal distributions over the factors, and joint distributions over the combinations.  Animals might have lots of forms, which are variable properties _of_ them.  Environments can be described in terms of many properties, and particular classes of environments might have distributions of properties that are concentrated in one region or another of the values the properties can take.  With regard to “being a place to live”, the “land” environments are concentrated over where weight-bearing is a challenge; the water environments are concentrated over where resistance to relative motion is a challenge.

 

3. Starting conditions for some joint distribution on objects and their environments can be different from later conditions for the same pairs.  So animals that have history in one set of settings can find themselves spending more time in other settings.  They are still good at what they were doing before, but not necessarily at what they mostly spend their time doing now.  Scientists can experience this phenomenon too, most especially when they are put into managerial positions.

 

4. One can put forth various null hypotheses for what a joint distribution could be, including the product of marginal distributions drawn from other conditions.  A joint distribution _could_ look like a product of a marginal distribution over tortious-like or elephant-like animals that are good at weight-bearing, with a marginal distribution over deep-water environments where weight-bearing is not a problem to be solved, but surmounting resistance to motion is a problem.  Often we imagine that the starting conditions in 3 have this character.  This is the early output of using something in a new way (the “ex” part of “exaptation”) before selective dynamics has produced the “aptation” part.

 

5. Joint distributions can change with time (evolve in the dynamical systems sense) so that at late times they are different from the products of marginals that were the null model or the starting condition.  One can speak of “information flow” from regularities in the environment (the fact that its distribution is concentrated in one part of the parameter space and not in another), “into” the marginal on the object, reducing some relative entropy for that marginal distribution.  The descendant animals in a population can have attenuated traits good for weight-bearing, relative to the traits expressed by their ancestors, and can have enhanced traits for reducing resistance to relative motion.  The information flow is the same as repeated application of a Bayesian updating rule (see Cosma Shalizi and Andrew Gelman, Electronic Journal of Statistcs, in the appendix somewhere) though I think this result has been known since antiquity).  In that direction, it is the “aptation” of adaptation, exaptation, or whatever.  Of course, events reducing a relative entropy for the environment could also flow the other way.  Phytoplankton can change viscosity, oxygenation, light-penetration, etc., of their environment, and this is what the niche-construction and ecosystem-engineering guys go on about.  There probably is a Bayesian construction for that too.

 

6. Instead of talking about information “flow” from one marginal to the other, one can instead speak of the increase in “mutual information” as the difference of some relative entropy of the joint distribution from relative entropies of the marginals, and can characterize a degree of adaptation through the increase in that mutual information.  Mutual information can increase through either adaptation or environmental modification, so merely its increase does not report on a directionality.  Chris Adami in early papers liked to emphasize the mutual information approach, because it is the correct zeroth-order answer to facile versions of “Shannon information isn’t semantic information”.  Nihat Ay and collaborators have done a lot, instantiated in robotic problems, with notions of information flows.  Probably David Wolpert up at SFI could reel off 400 citations summarizing the leading 1% of activity in the field as of the last 24 hours, if asked.  There are some nice things to say about how to cut up systems and environments, and to talk about how each affects the other, which come out of recent “stochastic thermodynamics”, and which I will get back to trying to write up after I exit this email.  It’s all more or less elementary, though.

 

 

I guess everybody in the list already knows this, so Nick’s question “wtf is natural design” is meant to take up where the above leaves off.  I guess Nick means “after the above trivialities are all acknowledged, then what does the expression _really_ mean”.  But those questions are always hard for me to understand when expressed at the level of 4 words, if one hasn’t first solved as much with the trivialities as one can, and then been more explicit about what is left unsatisfying or unclear.  Those things tend to be in the eye of the beholder, and cannot readily be guessed if there isn’t a starting platform of using the trivialities to their fullest extent.

 

Then, however, I think we encounter Jochen’s and I guess Russ’s point about “everything and nothing” (a point I also routinely make).  The statistical formulation above is enough to show constructively that there is a thing to describe, that it is not tautological and that it can vary in degree, following which we can attach a name to that construction.  But how it is achieved mechanistically can be through endlessly variable relations.  

 

This is the sense in which Darwinism per se was never much of a scientific revolution, and was and unfortunately still is mostly a social revolution of trying to wrestle thoughts about life away from the vitalists.  The scientific advancement, even in Darwin’s work, seems to have been mostly in showing that one could get enough control over the relations for particular classes of cases, to make Bayesian updating a plausibly _useful_ explanation.

 

From there one can branch into sub-categories: how important is individuality and population structure, versus continua, etc.  How much does one get from the substrate (chemistry, code, cognitive events, social norms and institutions?), and what part of the potential for design derives from the substrate and not from the general-purpose filtering problem?

 

But, enough.  

 

Eric

 

 

 

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[David Eric Smith]

Hi Nick,

Yes, wonderful questions all.  You are right to guess that there is an ocean of literature.  The entire part that I will know about will be akin to the atmosphere on a neutron star relative to the whole.  So I’ll choose anecdotes.

The most efficient way to get an idea of how much has been done would be to find a room with Michael Lynch in it, start a high-speed voice recorder, and then say in a loud voice “Evolution has never predicted anything” and hope the recorder can keep up with you get back.

On using natural design to predict.  Keeping with your theme of the swimming animals, just before my transition to SFI, I worked on shipboard with a wonderful oceanographer named Pete Jumars, who gave me one of his papers “Life at low Reynolds number”.  Maybe it was slides, because I never seem able to find it.  But a representative example of his concerns is here:

https://watermark.silverchair.com/30163297.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAngwggJ0BgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggJlMIICYQIBADCCAloGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMpsnXVnwawncC7LH0AgEQgIICK8wAfRq3YhVda7R-cwxV0q8l9hULy6E-W7VnRyafFjnz7p7exSyM-jCzdLUf3PqtGz1hnS3W30mzvVb-SMEXXnKA34Bwj4ZKzzYuOCTc4FYixhl-qwbKcNfeesvvF-PA6PXKTYsqiaZBTD25UgA2KokJ4qcKJid66vZ4yh4TE6iG3GHD2EDqsnCuRSnw4hRx_PWUYsSS6nVgcV4a6C1xUPtJAKocei7ylPgX10OFMqoYBo32Q62BZ6FD0HQ7JWtXmXRjntR0PYDDtQd1QbRUuX4kO2RBeccm_RkQlhMBNYOBFBhxz4Y_ljs4CW0uOcXy1oR1l0giKCjyolN-H6uEYCNtFao6BJbTV7ewb7wx4BvulOTptMlqkZsvDhLlrzOZi2UP6Sq9UkwCFsU858-V5NMaKbBmz1CvcG1PCZj1yNZ5tLpHsyjSczJHfbFF54ZLh5zKf0reL79QXLUKAMQeVIJwUXJY3e9XBXGJohilA41KQAT3DcozOVcvUY4p0LEjs7qsLaRbCq1lVjcQ8hYDBJ2GWK_GzgF4c4d1bUYFChwiwZjh9ZY0pIbZdZtpwv5PJVYUAG-Aa_6HAvNmCApx6S5NQY4F468aUaDgIlY9GmqCpZ0V_QpLmQfGXOcVZ8MBsifV6z5nlxRt_DF-LPFdvDEDr3PMR12azVDbE-Re0FT5_ts_SGQup0WdRs63SxqG_WK6iLnndQEJFVDR8VD19WSFaB2GNcmsrDuNGQ

Short story is: in the eyes of a fluid dynamicist, diatoms and other phytoplankton look more or less alike.  Much like whales and fish looked alike to Melville.  But phytoplankton don’t look anything like whales and fish.  The distinction being that the former live at low Reynolds number, while the latter at high.  So there is a difference in the relative strengths of viscosity and inertia.  Being a good diatom is achieved sometimes by looking like Sputnik (see some pictures in the above link).  So there are some levels where the grossness of the prediction is so extreme that one doesn’t even realize it is a prediction.  Yet it is just one dimensionless constant that governs regimes of fluid flow.

To your point about “bad design” etc., the resolution is to realize that there is a lot of architecture connecting selection across levels.  Darwin was already onto this (I think it was him) in recognizing that the question of why male mammals have non-lactating nipples is answered by recognizing that sexual dimorphism is a tiny veneer on a developmental sequence that is already complex, and constrained by many other pressures of re-use of components, need for robustness, scalability, and so forth.  From all the things we know about how sex differentiation is layered thinly on already highly-committed developmental machinery as deep in the phylogeny as it appears, that argument is only more starkly compelling.  The settling onto two genders appears to be clearly a typological category, arrived at convergently by several differently-organized genetic systems.  There are even vertebrates in which sex determination is late and environmentally gated (many kinds of fish).  So it doesn’t reach very far down into the locked-in hardware when it tries to make gender distinctions.  I would guess that the ability to make dimorphic sexual genders without having to interfere with core development is itself a capacity that has been under positive selection.  Maybe people like Gerhart and Kirschner would know (the argument they call “facilitated variation”, e.g. in Cells, Embryos, and Evolution), but I haven’t looked.

I think the major work that could be called the foundation stone of evo-devo was D’arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form.  The classic picture is that fish looking very different in outline are transformable one into another by conformal transformations (rather a stunning fact, when you wouldn’t think development would particularly care about preserving angles in a grid while it distorts lengths).  But the whole book, in a sense, lays out the realization that re-use of component-processes in nested hierarchies is essential to development, and thus the number of things that can be independently tweaked, economically and robustly, is limited.  Easy to make all the long bones shorter in a primate (compare body profiles of even different populations around the earth, only modestly isolated for only some thousands of years), but hard to systematically make one side short and the other long, or to make leg long-bones long but arm long-bones short, etc.  I think that covers the hyena in somewhat the same way as nipples.  

To go further, and ask why development should be so constrained to an economy of components and to re-use, one needs to start to get into questions about error correction, the cost of search, etc., and there I think the math does more just-so-story telling than it does prediction.  Although even there, I think when virologists look at the major families of diseases around the world that they know have many lurking members, they can try to estimate when a small number of mutations will change a binding affinity of some protein that enhances infectivity, virulence, replication numbers, or some other pathological trait.  That is behind these informal statements one hears, that “such-and-such a disease is probably only 3 or 4 mutations away from being a dangerous human pathogen”.

So, stuff of that sort.

All best,

Eric

On Jul 6, 2020, at 2:43 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric, 

 

Ok. So I have read your post and, while I still don’t understand everything you write, you seem to understand my question precisely and answer it voluminously.  We know what natural design is and it is a property of the relation between things and their environments, which individual organisms can instantiate but not by themselves exhibit.   To be humiliatingly honest, I had no awareness of the literature that you cite when I asked the question.  Nor, given the highly technical nature of that literature do I imagine I ever will.  

 

So, I have simply to put myself at your mercy and ask, Has anybody used that concept of natural design predictively? If I understand Darwin’s theory correctly, it asserts that better designed organisms should have more offspring than those less well designed.   

 

How does such an understanding of natural design handle such phenomena as the grossly hypertrophied plumage of some birds, or the extraordinary masculinized genitalia of the female spotted hyena, etc.  Are these instances of bad design?  I am hoping that the answer is yes, because they certainly seem like bad designs to me.  Thus, the contrary, that natural selection always produces natural design, is not validated and we need additional constructs if we are to accurately predict what natural selection produces.  

 

Thanks, as always, for your taking the time. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 5:42 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

Not good for me to do this, so let me try to be brief (never a thing I am good at).

 

0.  To repeat myself for the 100th time, of course if one structures conversations around writing down single words (“evolve”, “emergent”, “complexity") and arguing about what they _really_ mean, one can go on forever and happily never settle.  More complete sentences and operational definitions create a much more disappointing landscape, in which one can either reach an understanding, or reach a hard problem of insight for which one lacks a new idea, and either way the conversation does tend to end.  So one reboots with the one-word questions, re-opens the exploration phase, and tries another anneal.

 

On Jul 6, 2020, at 6:03 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

But this is useful. 

To put the question baldly, wtf is natural design, anyway, as a descriptive property.  

 

One can construe the question and its answer in many valid ways, and I only mean to say a specific thing about one of them; not to assert that is is better or only, just that it can be understood.

 

Natural design, interpreted descriptively, or causally, is among other things a distributional concept.  Basic commitments are these:

 

1. There is some sensible way to make a division of objects from environments.  It is not necessary to think of _the_ most naive way one might try to do this, and then fret that there are lots of cases it would get wrong; we have many tools for such divisions, and the ability to think precisely about many distinct kinds of relations.  But suppose there is some such division.  Animals are objects.  They might live on land or they might live in water.

 

2. Because there is a notion of factorability from 1, there are ways to talk about marginal distributions over the factors, and joint distributions over the combinations.  Animals might have lots of forms, which are variable properties _of_ them.  Environments can be described in terms of many properties, and particular classes of environments might have distributions of properties that are concentrated in one region or another of the values the properties can take.  With regard to “being a place to live”, the “land” environments are concentrated over where weight-bearing is a challenge; the water environments are concentrated over where resistance to relative motion is a challenge.

 

3. Starting conditions for some joint distribution on objects and their environments can be different from later conditions for the same pairs.  So animals that have history in one set of settings can find themselves spending more time in other settings.  They are still good at what they were doing before, but not necessarily at what they mostly spend their time doing now.  Scientists can experience this phenomenon too, most especially when they are put into managerial positions.

 

4. One can put forth various null hypotheses for what a joint distribution could be, including the product of marginal distributions drawn from other conditions.  A joint distribution _could_ look like a product of a marginal distribution over tortious-like or elephant-like animals that are good at weight-bearing, with a marginal distribution over deep-water environments where weight-bearing is not a problem to be solved, but surmounting resistance to motion is a problem.  Often we imagine that the starting conditions in 3 have this character.  This is the early output of using something in a new way (the “ex” part of “exaptation”) before selective dynamics has produced the “aptation” part.

 

5. Joint distributions can change with time (evolve in the dynamical systems sense) so that at late times they are different from the products of marginals that were the null model or the starting condition.  One can speak of “information flow” from regularities in the environment (the fact that its distribution is concentrated in one part of the parameter space and not in another), “into” the marginal on the object, reducing some relative entropy for that marginal distribution.  The descendant animals in a population can have attenuated traits good for weight-bearing, relative to the traits expressed by their ancestors, and can have enhanced traits for reducing resistance to relative motion.  The information flow is the same as repeated application of a Bayesian updating rule (see Cosma Shalizi and Andrew Gelman, Electronic Journal of Statistcs, in the appendix somewhere) though I think this result has been known since antiquity).  In that direction, it is the “aptation” of adaptation, exaptation, or whatever.  Of course, events reducing a relative entropy for the environment could also flow the other way.  Phytoplankton can change viscosity, oxygenation, light-penetration, etc., of their environment, and this is what the niche-construction and ecosystem-engineering guys go on about.  There probably is a Bayesian construction for that too.

 

6. Instead of talking about information “flow” from one marginal to the other, one can instead speak of the increase in “mutual information” as the difference of some relative entropy of the joint distribution from relative entropies of the marginals, and can characterize a degree of adaptation through the increase in that mutual information.  Mutual information can increase through either adaptation or environmental modification, so merely its increase does not report on a directionality.  Chris Adami in early papers liked to emphasize the mutual information approach, because it is the correct zeroth-order answer to facile versions of “Shannon information isn’t semantic information”.  Nihat Ay and collaborators have done a lot, instantiated in robotic problems, with notions of information flows.  Probably David Wolpert up at SFI could reel off 400 citations summarizing the leading 1% of activity in the field as of the last 24 hours, if asked.  There are some nice things to say about how to cut up systems and environments, and to talk about how each affects the other, which come out of recent “stochastic thermodynamics”, and which I will get back to trying to write up after I exit this email.  It’s all more or less elementary, though.

 

 

I guess everybody in the list already knows this, so Nick’s question “wtf is natural design” is meant to take up where the above leaves off.  I guess Nick means “after the above trivialities are all acknowledged, then what does the expression _really_ mean”.  But those questions are always hard for me to understand when expressed at the level of 4 words, if one hasn’t first solved as much with the trivialities as one can, and then been more explicit about what is left unsatisfying or unclear.  Those things tend to be in the eye of the beholder, and cannot readily be guessed if there isn’t a starting platform of using the trivialities to their fullest extent.

 

Then, however, I think we encounter Jochen’s and I guess Russ’s point about “everything and nothing” (a point I also routinely make).  The statistical formulation above is enough to show constructively that there is a thing to describe, that it is not tautological and that it can vary in degree, following which we can attach a name to that construction.  But how it is achieved mechanistically can be through endlessly variable relations.  

 

This is the sense in which Darwinism per se was never much of a scientific revolution, and was and unfortunately still is mostly a social revolution of trying to wrestle thoughts about life away from the vitalists.  The scientific advancement, even in Darwin’s work, seems to have been mostly in showing that one could get enough control over the relations for particular classes of cases, to make Bayesian updating a plausibly _useful_ explanation.

 

From there one can branch into sub-categories: how important is individuality and population structure, versus continua, etc.  How much does one get from the substrate (chemistry, code, cognitive events, social norms and institutions?), and what part of the potential for design derives from the substrate and not from the general-purpose filtering problem?

 

But, enough.  

 

Eric

 

 

 

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 5:42 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

Not good for me to do this, so let me try to be brief (never a thing I am good at).

 

0.  To repeat myself for the 100th time, of course if one structures conversations around writing down single words (“evolve”, “emergent”, “complexity") and arguing about what they _really_ mean, one can go on forever and happily never settle.  More complete sentences and operational definitions create a much more disappointing landscape, in which one can either reach an understanding, or reach a hard problem of insight for which one lacks a new idea, and either way the conversation does tend to end.  So one reboots with the one-word questions, re-opens the exploration phase, and tries another anneal.

 

On Jul 6, 2020, at 6:03 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

But this is useful. 

To put the question baldly, wtf is natural design, anyway, as a descriptive property.  

 

One can construe the question and its answer in many valid ways, and I only mean to say a specific thing about one of them; not to assert that is is better or only, just that it can be understood.

 

Natural design, interpreted descriptively, or causally, is among other things a distributional concept.  Basic commitments are these:

 

1. There is some sensible way to make a division of objects from environments.  It is not necessary to think of _the_ most naive way one might try to do this, and then fret that there are lots of cases it would get wrong; we have many tools for such divisions, and the ability to think precisely about many distinct kinds of relations.  But suppose there is some such division.  Animals are objects.  They might live on land or they might live in water.

 

2. Because there is a notion of factorability from 1, there are ways to talk about marginal distributions over the factors, and joint distributions over the combinations.  Animals might have lots of forms, which are variable properties _of_ them.  Environments can be described in terms of many properties, and particular classes of environments might have distributions of properties that are concentrated in one region or another of the values the properties can take.  With regard to “being a place to live”, the “land” environments are concentrated over where weight-bearing is a challenge; the water environments are concentrated over where resistance to relative motion is a challenge.

 

3. Starting conditions for some joint distribution on objects and their environments can be different from later conditions for the same pairs.  So animals that have history in one set of settings can find themselves spending more time in other settings.  They are still good at what they were doing before, but not necessarily at what they mostly spend their time doing now.  Scientists can experience this phenomenon too, most especially when they are put into managerial positions.

 

4. One can put forth various null hypotheses for what a joint distribution could be, including the product of marginal distributions drawn from other conditions.  A joint distribution _could_ look like a product of a marginal distribution over tortious-like or elephant-like animals that are good at weight-bearing, with a marginal distribution over deep-water environments where weight-bearing is not a problem to be solved, but surmounting resistance to motion is a problem.  Often we imagine that the starting conditions in 3 have this character.  This is the early output of using something in a new way (the “ex” part of “exaptation”) before selective dynamics has produced the “aptation” part.

 

5. Joint distributions can change with time (evolve in the dynamical systems sense) so that at late times they are different from the products of marginals that were the null model or the starting condition.  One can speak of “information flow” from regularities in the environment (the fact that its distribution is concentrated in one part of the parameter space and not in another), “into” the marginal on the object, reducing some relative entropy for that marginal distribution.  The descendant animals in a population can have attenuated traits good for weight-bearing, relative to the traits expressed by their ancestors, and can have enhanced traits for reducing resistance to relative motion.  The information flow is the same as repeated application of a Bayesian updating rule (see Cosma Shalizi and Andrew Gelman, Electronic Journal of Statistcs, in the appendix somewhere) though I think this result has been known since antiquity).  In that direction, it is the “aptation” of adaptation, exaptation, or whatever.  Of course, events reducing a relative entropy for the environment could also flow the other way.  Phytoplankton can change viscosity, oxygenation, light-penetration, etc., of their environment, and this is what the niche-construction and ecosystem-engineering guys go on about.  There probably is a Bayesian construction for that too.

 

6. Instead of talking about information “flow” from one marginal to the other, one can instead speak of the increase in “mutual information” as the difference of some relative entropy of the joint distribution from relative entropies of the marginals, and can characterize a degree of adaptation through the increase in that mutual information.  Mutual information can increase through either adaptation or environmental modification, so merely its increase does not report on a directionality.  Chris Adami in early papers liked to emphasize the mutual information approach, because it is the correct zeroth-order answer to facile versions of “Shannon information isn’t semantic information”.  Nihat Ay and collaborators have done a lot, instantiated in robotic problems, with notions of information flows.  Probably David Wolpert up at SFI could reel off 400 citations summarizing the leading 1% of activity in the field as of the last 24 hours, if asked.  There are some nice things to say about how to cut up systems and environments, and to talk about how each affects the other, which come out of recent “stochastic thermodynamics”, and which I will get back to trying to write up after I exit this email.  It’s all more or less elementary, though.

 

 

I guess everybody in the list already knows this, so Nick’s question “wtf is natural design” is meant to take up where the above leaves off.  I guess Nick means “after the above trivialities are all acknowledged, then what does the expression _really_ mean”.  But those questions are always hard for me to understand when expressed at the level of 4 words, if one hasn’t first solved as much with the trivialities as one can, and then been more explicit about what is left unsatisfying or unclear.  Those things tend to be in the eye of the beholder, and cannot readily be guessed if there isn’t a starting platform of using the trivialities to their fullest extent.

 

Then, however, I think we encounter Jochen’s and I guess Russ’s point about “everything and nothing” (a point I also routinely make).  The statistical formulation above is enough to show constructively that there is a thing to describe, that it is not tautological and that it can vary in degree, following which we can attach a name to that construction.  But how it is achieved mechanistically can be through endlessly variable relations.  

 

This is the sense in which Darwinism per se was never much of a scientific revolution, and was and unfortunately still is mostly a social revolution of trying to wrestle thoughts about life away from the vitalists.  The scientific advancement, even in Darwin’s work, seems to have been mostly in showing that one could get enough control over the relations for particular classes of cases, to make Bayesian updating a plausibly _useful_ explanation.

 

From there one can branch into sub-categories: how important is individuality and population structure, versus continua, etc.  How much does one get from the substrate (chemistry, code, cognitive events, social norms and institutions?), and what part of the potential for design derives from the substrate and not from the general-purpose filtering problem?

 

But, enough.  

 

Eric

 

 

 

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[jon zingale]

The version of "Life at low Reynolds number" that I am familiar with is this
one:
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/purcell.pdf

A wonderful lecture.



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[gepr]

Sooooo... I'm familiar with both Reynolds and Mach from my days at Lockheed. But Mach, as I (probably don't) understand it, is tied to sound only because that's an indirect measure of the medium's compressibility, sound being compression waves. In thinking about these "low Reynolds number" organisms, I can't help but wonder what the analog for the "speed of sound" is for them. It strikes me that E. coli live way above "Mach 1", they live near Mach ∞, right? But if the medium is effectively incompressible, can there be pressure gradients across the organism's membrane? There must be, right? Since these things have internal architecture, including vacuoles, movement like the amoeba's "processes" seems more interesting than the poloidal rotation he mentions. Does the amoeba "push" against its medium? Or simply "grow through it"?

One of the coolest things about tissues to me is that they engineer their world, extruding their tools and infrastructure like so many dorks with 3D printers. I've only briefly skimmed the Purcell paper, but I didn't see anything about if/how microorganisms might do the same. If the amoeba-like ones "grow" through the medium, rather than pushing/pulling, then maybe the analog for the Mach number is related to diffusion and gradients, which makes Purcell's discussion of it on point, but doesn't go far enough.

On 7/6/20 8:02 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> The version of "Life at low Reynolds number" that I am familiar with is this
> one:
> http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/purcell.pdf


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[David Eric Smith]

Thank you Jon,

Yes, I had forgotten that Purcell did the original of this, and I may not have seen this particular lecture.  (I don’t have recall of the hand pictures.)

What a remarkable guy he was.  In almost any topic where he wrote teaching materials, his are the best version on the subject.

Little fun note:  When I was first trying to learn some biochemistry, way back in the earliest days at Los Alamos, I went to Hans Frauenfelder at CNLS to ask for advice.  All the biochem books available looked to me like books of case law, just scrolls and scrolls of details, and descriptions of patterns, but nothing I could recognize as a principle that could be used in any kind of constructive analysis.  It seemed like just a vast memorization exercise, with no objective but to be able to repeat what one had been told to remember.  Frauenfelder pointed me to Lubert Stryer’s biochem book, and told me it was really the only one that was well matched to a physicist’s style of learning. To convince me?  Stryer has an explicit note of thanks to Purcell in the acknowledgment.  The man did get around.

Best,

Eric

> On Jul 7, 2020, at 12:02 AM, Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> The version of "Life at low Reynolds number" that I am familiar with is this
> one:
> http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/purcell.pdf
>
> A wonderful lecture.
>
>
>
> --
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[thompnickson2]

Speaking of Reynolds numbers?

A great many years ago I had an undergraduate honors student who wanted to work with slime molds.  These are social single celled organisms that, when things get tough, flow together to form a stem and a fruiting body.  From the fruiting body are distributed spores for the next generation. Only some small percentage of the original cells get into the fruiting body, so they pose a problem of the "group selection" type.  We were wondering whether we should be thinking of fruiting bodies as like dandelions or like burrs.  A little reflection about scale and viscosity suggested that dandelions was a stupid model.  The student devoted some time to mimicking with a probe what would happen if an ant brushed up against a fruiting body, and found that, indeed, they were extremely sticky.  We were overjoyed.  But then the student  fell in love, and I never saw him again.  

Let that be a lesson to you all.  

Nick  

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of ? u?l?
Sent: Monday, July 6, 2020 2:18 PM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

Sooooo... I'm familiar with both Reynolds and Mach from my days at Lockheed. But Mach, as I (probably don't) understand it, is tied to sound only because that's an indirect measure of the medium's compressibility, sound being compression waves. In thinking about these "low Reynolds number" organisms, I can't help but wonder what the analog for the "speed of sound" is for them. It strikes me that E. coli live way above "Mach 1", they live near Mach ∞, right? But if the medium is effectively incompressible, can there be pressure gradients across the organism's membrane? There must be, right? Since these things have internal architecture, including vacuoles, movement like the amoeba's "processes" seems more interesting than the poloidal rotation he mentions. Does the amoeba "push" against its medium? Or simply "grow through it"?

One of the coolest things about tissues to me is that they engineer their world, extruding their tools and infrastructure like so many dorks with 3D printers. I've only briefly skimmed the Purcell paper, but I didn't see anything about if/how microorganisms might do the same. If the amoeba-like ones "grow" through the medium, rather than pushing/pulling, then maybe the analog for the Mach number is related to diffusion and gradients, which makes Purcell's discussion of it on point, but doesn't go far enough.

On 7/6/20 8:02 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> The version of "Life at low Reynolds number" that I am familiar with
> is this
> one:
> http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/purcell.pdf


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[Sarbajit Roy (testing)]

Gary

Actually I agree with you to a considerable extent.

Let us consider Edward's book, On Amazon-India his book (the 7th edn) is available to us at a Kindle price of approx $9.50. Amazon sells the same Kindle book in China at $45 and at $155+ for Kindle in the USA.

What does this suggest to you ? For me it's that the authors are not making the profits - Jeff Bezos &Co. do

Now to come back to the question of why prices in India are affordable, it's because we have (had ?) a few activist judges who ensured that India's constitutional status as a socialist state means the needs of the many (parasites ?) takes priority over the profits of the producers (creators).

The prices of most life-saving quality drugs in India are probably 1/20th of what you would pay in the States. That's because the same court enforced our nation's sovereign rights under TRIPS/CUTS/WTO agreements etc . When I read about poor people in USA not being able to afford their next insulin shot because it's so darn expensive, you may like to know that a 30 shot insulin Flexpen costs about $5 while the same manufacturer sells the identical pen for 20 times the price in New York.

Sarbajit

On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 6:09 AM Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

No offense to the government of your country, but just because its courts have judged it to be legal, doesn't make it right. Of course "right" is a subjective, moral concept, and I hasten to add that morality is relative and personal. Additionally, I don't know how subject other countries are to the pronouncements of a particular country's judgments. I'll leave that to the United Nations. But in the case of copyrights, my own view of what is right is that the availability for copying of material should ideally be in the hands of the author. My two cents worth.

On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 7:11 PM Sarbajit Roy <[hidden email]> wrote:

I got your book from here
https://www.pdfdrive.com/interactive-computer-graphics-a-top-down-approach-with-webgl-edward-angel-and-dave-d38281420.html

The Indian judgment is clear, Reproduction is limited to a copy which the teacher/institute has LEGALLY purchased.

There are other judgments from the same court directing that thousands of infringing movie piracy websites (and their whack-a-mole clones) are blocked in India for copyright violation and harm caused to producers.

https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Utv_Software_Communication_Ltd._..._vs_1337X.To_And_Ors_on_10_April_2019-1.pdf

Sarbajit

On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 5:17 AM Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks but the story is more complex. 

What transpired is in retrospect somewhat amusing. I received an email from someone at a university that was using the book asking if I knew there was a ps file on the web of the whole book. I checked it out, contacted the instructor who had it taken down. I had no idea how anyone had obtained a perfect copy of the book. Even during copyediting, I never was given access to a final ps version with even the typesetting marks. My editor started a big investigation at Pearson to see who had violated security during production only to find out after weeks that the people at Pearson who dealt with accessibility issues were sending out the file to every school that adopted the book (at the time around 200 just in the US).

What is odd to me is that the last time I checked libgen.io, which was a while ago, the version there was not a ps version put a pdf in which you could use the TOC interactively so I figured it was the kindle version which my editor, who had become somewhat expert at this, showed me how easy it is to get the kindle version. Apparently what is the the situation now is that the ps version is libgen.is so someone else must have uploaded it.

The material on the Indian decision on respect to fair use was very interesting. I was familiar with the fair use policies in the U.S. and the U.K. In spirit, they are the same. However, the problem is not fair use but with sites like libgen, where anyone can upload a file irrespective of copyright or ownership  That file is then available worldwide to everyone. Consequently, the holders of the copyright have no protection at all other than some people having ethical issues with libgen. Sadly, I find many of my colleagues and students do not see this as an ethical issue. 

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 5, 2020, at 4:14 PM, Sarbajit Roy <[hidden email]> wrote:

Edward

The PDF of the 7th edition of your book being widely circulated was very likely not generated from its Kindle version, but from the Postscript version used to print your book. It was generated using Adobe Distiller 7+ for a Macintosh. Must have been cloned from one of those unwatermarked copies dished out by your publisher's marketing team to "potential" customers.

Sarbajit

On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 2:52 AM Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

I’ve been a book author since 1972 and a textbook author since 1989. My computer graphics textbook has been the most popular book in the area for 20 years and just came out in its eighth edition with various editions being available in Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Russian. Sadly, the book business has changed over that time; changed in way that is bad for almost everyone, especially authors. I think you’re faced with a lot of bad choices. I hope some of the following will prove helpful. And if not helpful, at least interesting.

Before I forget, you might enjoy reading of my adventures writing the first edition of my present textbook while on sabbatical in Venezuela, Ecuador, Hong Kong and Nepal. There’s a pointer to it on my home page www.cs.unm.edu/~angel 

When I had to pick a publisher, I knew the editors and  local book reps at Academic Press, Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall and Benjamin/Cummings. They dominated the CS field and did so largely because they had editors who knew the field, excellent book reps who knew the needs of the faculty and students, a willingness to invest in a book, and in-house production. None of these exist anymore and, as Tom pointed out, you're largely on your own. It’s unfortunate if you care about how many copies get sold and your royalties. I have many friends who self-published in the past. It’s a lot of work either way but I prefer to put my effort into content and not type-setting or marketing. None of my self-published friends have ever sold many books.

I had three excellent editors over 20 years. When I did my first edition, my editor hired a development editor at great expense to improve the quality of my writing. She worked with the CS faculty and grad students at Caltech and Stanford. It made a huge difference. Now almost none of these jobs exist within the publishers. All production is contracted out to the low bidders (art, typesetting, copy editing, etc) most of whom are in India. I no longer have an editor. There is one person working for the publusher with whom I communicate with to try to get things done correctly with the contractors. This last edition has been a long painful experience. 

So what happened? Books were always expensive for students, especially when sold through college bookstores. Then used book sellers appeared and Asian students started importing low cost Asian versions of the standard textbooks. Under US copyright laws, both are legal. The publishers responded by upping prices which reduced sales even more.

And then came electronic media. At first, my book, like most others, was still print-only. But the publisher sent perfect unwatermarked pdfs to all the schools what adopted the book for use by students with special needs. Wasn’t long before those pdfs made it to the Web. Then they had a electronic version and a kindle version that students could rent for a semester or year. The publisher, the largest in the business, was clueless about web security and had no idea that Kindles are not secure. Very quickly, the book appeared (with most of the other cs texts and various best sellers) on a Russian website as a “public service.” End of paid sales.

The new edition is only available in electronic form and the publisher claims it is only available on a secure site. I doubt anyone on this list believes that.

Although I never in the past had issues with the publisher having the copyright, which was pretty standard, I wish I had it now. Since there is no hope of making significant royalties now (we used), my coauthor and I would like to put the book out for free on our websites rather than having it appear on various illegal Russian sites known to most students.

Personally, I no longer care about royalties but the long term issue I worry about is why would any young person write a textbook. It’s a huge amount of work and usually not something that in the academic world is valued as highly as research papers and grant funding.

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 4, 2020, at 2:25 PM, Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks. Yes, self-publishing is an option. I am looking for an official publisher mainly for one reason, namely that other scientists and researchers can cite it, since I still cling to the illusion that someone would actually do it. Normally self-published texts are not considered as reliable or trustworthy sources. I didn't expect that finding a decent publisher would be so difficult. 

-J.

-------- Original message --------

From: Tom Johnson <[hidden email]>

Date: 7/4/20 20:10 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

Jochen:

The deal being offered strikes me as a bad deal.

Background:  I have been practicing and teaching about "Be Your Own Publisher" for nearly 15 years.  There are, in my opinion, some major problems with all publishers today.  It starts with control of the copyright.  I think YOU should want to maintain control of the copyright to your work.  It will depend on the contract, but many or most publishers will try to lock down the copyright in their favor for all -- ALL -- forms of your work in perpetuity and throughout the universe.  Sometimes quite literally.

Second, you should assume -- especially with a small publisher and you, not being as well known  as Stephen King or Daniel Steele  -- the publisher will do little if anything to promote your book beyond a mention in its catalog and, maybe, some promotional links on Amazon.  Given that, a 5 percent royalty should be seen as a con.

Third, given your computing experience, you should find it easy to format and produce the book yourself.  I have used Lulu.com for years.  It is especially good if you want to have both hardback, paperback and PDF editions.  Again the advantages: you keep the copyright, you can set (and change) the prices and to a degree the royalties.  Also, Lulu and Amazon handle all the backend financial arrangements and administration and pay directly and quickly.  I also use a very good, high quality digital printer in Albuquerque for paperback editions.  It is Lithexcel.  It handles all the printing (one copy to any number) quickly, along with all the fulfillment and accounting. The folks there will also, for only $25, set up your book in the Amazon inventory search engine.  Finally, there is Amazon's self-publishing arm.  While Amazon might take a bigger slice, the control over all aspects is in your hands.

Here's the problem/challenge with all of these.  YOU have to do the marketing/publicity/promotion.  But so what?  If you today sign with any publisher of any size you will have to do the same thing.

Hope this helps.  Feel free to contact me with questions.  Also you might want to see https://bit.ly/2ZvihKc 

Tom

============================================
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Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
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On Fri, Jul 3, 2020 at 1:29 AM Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

At one end of the spectrum there are the 5 big commercial publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. They only publish stuff their agents select to make a lot of money. There are also the big academic publishers like OUP, CUP, HUP and MIT Press, which preferably publish strictly peer-reviewed content from professors at Ivy League universities who made their PhD at the age of 20.

At the other end of the spectrum there are "predatory publishers" who publish anything you submit as long as you pay enough money for it. Open access books can also be very expensive. Publishing an "open access book" at De Gruyter for example costs up to 8000 $. You pay for it so that other people read it. It is basically some kind of advertising of your own work.

For my own new book I finally have an offer from a small publisher in Washington D.C. who is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. They are really small and offer 5% royalties. Should I accept this offer or wait for a better one? It is the only one from more than 25 publishers I have asked, and the publishers at the moment are flooded with submissions. :-/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/26/novel-writing-during-coronavirus-crisis-outbreak

-J.

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[Gary Schiltz-4]

Sarbajit, I appreciate your perspective. I didn't realize that India's constitution declares it to be a socialist state. Perhaps India could be cited more often as an example of socialism actually working in an advanced democracy, alongside capitalism. 

On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 5:00 PM Sarbajit Roy <[hidden email]> wrote:

Gary

Actually I agree with you to a considerable extent.

Let us consider Edward's book, On Amazon-India his book (the 7th edn) is available to us at a Kindle price of approx $9.50. Amazon sells the same Kindle book in China at $45 and at $155+ for Kindle in the USA.

What does this suggest to you ? For me it's that the authors are not making the profits - Jeff Bezos &Co. do

Now to come back to the question of why prices in India are affordable, it's because we have (had ?) a few activist judges who ensured that India's constitutional status as a socialist state means the needs of the many (parasites ?) takes priority over the profits of the producers (creators).

The prices of most life-saving quality drugs in India are probably 1/20th of what you would pay in the States. That's because the same court enforced our nation's sovereign rights under TRIPS/CUTS/WTO agreements etc . When I read about poor people in USA not being able to afford their next insulin shot because it's so darn expensive, you may like to know that a 30 shot insulin Flexpen costs about $5 while the same manufacturer sells the identical pen for 20 times the price in New York.

Sarbajit

On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 6:09 AM Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

No offense to the government of your country, but just because its courts have judged it to be legal, doesn't make it right. Of course "right" is a subjective, moral concept, and I hasten to add that morality is relative and personal. Additionally, I don't know how subject other countries are to the pronouncements of a particular country's judgments. I'll leave that to the United Nations. But in the case of copyrights, my own view of what is right is that the availability for copying of material should ideally be in the hands of the author. My two cents worth.

On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 7:11 PM Sarbajit Roy <[hidden email]> wrote:

I got your book from here
https://www.pdfdrive.com/interactive-computer-graphics-a-top-down-approach-with-webgl-edward-angel-and-dave-d38281420.html

The Indian judgment is clear, Reproduction is limited to a copy which the teacher/institute has LEGALLY purchased.

There are other judgments from the same court directing that thousands of infringing movie piracy websites (and their whack-a-mole clones) are blocked in India for copyright violation and harm caused to producers.

https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Utv_Software_Communication_Ltd._..._vs_1337X.To_And_Ors_on_10_April_2019-1.pdf

Sarbajit

On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 5:17 AM Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks but the story is more complex. 

What transpired is in retrospect somewhat amusing. I received an email from someone at a university that was using the book asking if I knew there was a ps file on the web of the whole book. I checked it out, contacted the instructor who had it taken down. I had no idea how anyone had obtained a perfect copy of the book. Even during copyediting, I never was given access to a final ps version with even the typesetting marks. My editor started a big investigation at Pearson to see who had violated security during production only to find out after weeks that the people at Pearson who dealt with accessibility issues were sending out the file to every school that adopted the book (at the time around 200 just in the US).

What is odd to me is that the last time I checked libgen.io, which was a while ago, the version there was not a ps version put a pdf in which you could use the TOC interactively so I figured it was the kindle version which my editor, who had become somewhat expert at this, showed me how easy it is to get the kindle version. Apparently what is the the situation now is that the ps version is libgen.is so someone else must have uploaded it.

The material on the Indian decision on respect to fair use was very interesting. I was familiar with the fair use policies in the U.S. and the U.K. In spirit, they are the same. However, the problem is not fair use but with sites like libgen, where anyone can upload a file irrespective of copyright or ownership  That file is then available worldwide to everyone. Consequently, the holders of the copyright have no protection at all other than some people having ethical issues with libgen. Sadly, I find many of my colleagues and students do not see this as an ethical issue. 

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 5, 2020, at 4:14 PM, Sarbajit Roy <[hidden email]> wrote:

Edward

The PDF of the 7th edition of your book being widely circulated was very likely not generated from its Kindle version, but from the Postscript version used to print your book. It was generated using Adobe Distiller 7+ for a Macintosh. Must have been cloned from one of those unwatermarked copies dished out by your publisher's marketing team to "potential" customers.

Sarbajit

On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 2:52 AM Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

I’ve been a book author since 1972 and a textbook author since 1989. My computer graphics textbook has been the most popular book in the area for 20 years and just came out in its eighth edition with various editions being available in Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Russian. Sadly, the book business has changed over that time; changed in way that is bad for almost everyone, especially authors. I think you’re faced with a lot of bad choices. I hope some of the following will prove helpful. And if not helpful, at least interesting.

Before I forget, you might enjoy reading of my adventures writing the first edition of my present textbook while on sabbatical in Venezuela, Ecuador, Hong Kong and Nepal. There’s a pointer to it on my home page www.cs.unm.edu/~angel 

When I had to pick a publisher, I knew the editors and  local book reps at Academic Press, Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall and Benjamin/Cummings. They dominated the CS field and did so largely because they had editors who knew the field, excellent book reps who knew the needs of the faculty and students, a willingness to invest in a book, and in-house production. None of these exist anymore and, as Tom pointed out, you're largely on your own. It’s unfortunate if you care about how many copies get sold and your royalties. I have many friends who self-published in the past. It’s a lot of work either way but I prefer to put my effort into content and not type-setting or marketing. None of my self-published friends have ever sold many books.

I had three excellent editors over 20 years. When I did my first edition, my editor hired a development editor at great expense to improve the quality of my writing. She worked with the CS faculty and grad students at Caltech and Stanford. It made a huge difference. Now almost none of these jobs exist within the publishers. All production is contracted out to the low bidders (art, typesetting, copy editing, etc) most of whom are in India. I no longer have an editor. There is one person working for the publusher with whom I communicate with to try to get things done correctly with the contractors. This last edition has been a long painful experience. 

So what happened? Books were always expensive for students, especially when sold through college bookstores. Then used book sellers appeared and Asian students started importing low cost Asian versions of the standard textbooks. Under US copyright laws, both are legal. The publishers responded by upping prices which reduced sales even more.

And then came electronic media. At first, my book, like most others, was still print-only. But the publisher sent perfect unwatermarked pdfs to all the schools what adopted the book for use by students with special needs. Wasn’t long before those pdfs made it to the Web. Then they had a electronic version and a kindle version that students could rent for a semester or year. The publisher, the largest in the business, was clueless about web security and had no idea that Kindles are not secure. Very quickly, the book appeared (with most of the other cs texts and various best sellers) on a Russian website as a “public service.” End of paid sales.

The new edition is only available in electronic form and the publisher claims it is only available on a secure site. I doubt anyone on this list believes that.

Although I never in the past had issues with the publisher having the copyright, which was pretty standard, I wish I had it now. Since there is no hope of making significant royalties now (we used), my coauthor and I would like to put the book out for free on our websites rather than having it appear on various illegal Russian sites known to most students.

Personally, I no longer care about royalties but the long term issue I worry about is why would any young person write a textbook. It’s a huge amount of work and usually not something that in the academic world is valued as highly as research papers and grant funding.

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 4, 2020, at 2:25 PM, Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks. Yes, self-publishing is an option. I am looking for an official publisher mainly for one reason, namely that other scientists and researchers can cite it, since I still cling to the illusion that someone would actually do it. Normally self-published texts are not considered as reliable or trustworthy sources. I didn't expect that finding a decent publisher would be so difficult. 

-J.

-------- Original message --------

From: Tom Johnson <[hidden email]>

Date: 7/4/20 20:10 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

Jochen:

The deal being offered strikes me as a bad deal.

Background:  I have been practicing and teaching about "Be Your Own Publisher" for nearly 15 years.  There are, in my opinion, some major problems with all publishers today.  It starts with control of the copyright.  I think YOU should want to maintain control of the copyright to your work.  It will depend on the contract, but many or most publishers will try to lock down the copyright in their favor for all -- ALL -- forms of your work in perpetuity and throughout the universe.  Sometimes quite literally.

Second, you should assume -- especially with a small publisher and you, not being as well known  as Stephen King or Daniel Steele  -- the publisher will do little if anything to promote your book beyond a mention in its catalog and, maybe, some promotional links on Amazon.  Given that, a 5 percent royalty should be seen as a con.

Third, given your computing experience, you should find it easy to format and produce the book yourself.  I have used Lulu.com for years.  It is especially good if you want to have both hardback, paperback and PDF editions.  Again the advantages: you keep the copyright, you can set (and change) the prices and to a degree the royalties.  Also, Lulu and Amazon handle all the backend financial arrangements and administration and pay directly and quickly.  I also use a very good, high quality digital printer in Albuquerque for paperback editions.  It is Lithexcel.  It handles all the printing (one copy to any number) quickly, along with all the fulfillment and accounting. The folks there will also, for only $25, set up your book in the Amazon inventory search engine.  Finally, there is Amazon's self-publishing arm.  While Amazon might take a bigger slice, the control over all aspects is in your hands.

Here's the problem/challenge with all of these.  YOU have to do the marketing/publicity/promotion.  But so what?  If you today sign with any publisher of any size you will have to do the same thing.

Hope this helps.  Feel free to contact me with questions.  Also you might want to see https://bit.ly/2ZvihKc 

Tom

============================================
Tom Johnson - [hidden email]
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
NM Foundation for Open Government
Check out It's The People's Data                 

============================================

Virus-free. www.avast.com

On Fri, Jul 3, 2020 at 1:29 AM Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

At one end of the spectrum there are the 5 big commercial publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. They only publish stuff their agents select to make a lot of money. There are also the big academic publishers like OUP, CUP, HUP and MIT Press, which preferably publish strictly peer-reviewed content from professors at Ivy League universities who made their PhD at the age of 20.

At the other end of the spectrum there are "predatory publishers" who publish anything you submit as long as you pay enough money for it. Open access books can also be very expensive. Publishing an "open access book" at De Gruyter for example costs up to 8000 $. You pay for it so that other people read it. It is basically some kind of advertising of your own work.

For my own new book I finally have an offer from a small publisher in Washington D.C. who is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. They are really small and offer 5% royalties. Should I accept this offer or wait for a better one? It is the only one from more than 25 publishers I have asked, and the publishers at the moment are flooded with submissions. :-/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/26/novel-writing-during-coronavirus-crisis-outbreak

-J.

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