[FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

Sun Jul 5 17:10:10 EDT 2020

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

============================================
Tom Johnson - tom at jtjohnson.com
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
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*NM Foundation for Open Government* <http://nmfog.org>
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On Sat, Jul 4, 2020 at 5:47 PM Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com>
wrote:

> 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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