[FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

[Stephen Guerin]

Ed,

I just ordered your 8th edition from Pearson
<https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/program/ANGEL-Pearson-e-Text-Interactive-Computer-Graphics-Access-Card-8th-Edition/PGM2160099.html?tab=order>
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 <angel at cs.unm.edu> 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)   angel at cs.unm.edu
> 505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel
>
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