Re: The disappearing virtual library

Posted by Douglas Roberts-2 on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/The-disappearing-virtual-library-tp7485007p7487691.html

Well, maybe.

But I'd be willing to bet that if a big-name physicist were to publish a physics text, with the intent that it become the standard for teaching his/her physics specialty, Wiley would find themselves sucking vacuum.

Say, for example, that George Smoot wanted to self-publish a grad-level textbook on cosmic anisotropies...

I agree, though, that for the foreseeable future lesser-known/lesser-quality scientists will need to rely on a big-name publisher to attract the cache necessary to become an accepted textbook author.  Fortunately, in the relatively short period of time that ebooks have come into their own, the same is no longer true for fiction authors.

--Doug

On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 12:14 PM, Bruce Sherwood <[hidden email]> wrote:

The situation for complex textbooks is quite different from the
situation for other kinds of books.

For nearly 20 years Ruth and I did ALL of the work on our physics
textbook, which was possible only because we have very strong computer
skills. We also did most of the marketing. It was only with the 3rd
edition that the publisher put in sizable resources in the form of
much improved layout design, colorizing our thousands of two-color
diagrams, highly skilled detailed copy editing, reviews, and
marketing. We provided LaTeX that was relatively simple in terms of
layout but contained all of the many thousands of equations, but they
paid for the design to be implemented in the LaTeX imports of our
text. They also paid for the conversion to an ebook format, something
that currently is highly non-trivial starting from LaTeX.

Most authors of physics texts do not have the skills to have gotten as
far as we did before the 3rd edition, and we couldn't have gone the
last mile that led to the much improved 3rd edition.

Certainly we could have done something not too shabby completely on
our own, self-publishing, but as I reported in earlier notes, it was
absolutely crucial that the known Wiley imprimatur be on the book;
otherwise no one would have paid any attention to it. Also, the Wiley
name means to potential adopters that the book will be available a
couple of years from now, and maintained and corrected -- that the web
site won't just disappear.

I have no doubt that even complex projects of our kind will eventually
lend themselves to self-publishing, and I have little doubt that
eventually the imprimatur/certification role of major publishers will
fade too, as alternative reviewing mechanisms take firmer hold. But I
just wanted to emphasize that in the real world of publishing intro
physics textbooks we ain't there yet.

Bruce

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