If it’s hard to turn, it tends to keep going in the same direction.
There are a million examples of this, from actual giant oil tankers to the Department of Defense. One that has been interesting me for years is the business of publishing, whether newspapers, books, or music. Here’s a lovely example: Mapping the Galaxy and other Galaxies [Kindle Edition].
As you can see in the screenshot, the Kindle price is $148.00 — a whole $37 discount over the hardcover, which lists for $185.
(That turns out to be in the neighborhood of 46¢ a page, but that’s a rant for another time, except to note that it’s about 10 times what it would cost to just photocopy the damn book.)
It’s also a conference proceedings, which means
- the individual authors were likely required to either submit camera-ready copy, or submit their papers in a standard format
- the authors receive no royalties
- the conference organizers receive no royalties
- the intention of the conference attendees is to disseminate the information, not restrict it.
Now, you can make the case that with the number of copies likely to be sold, they must amortize the cost of printing and binding, and that accounts for the high individual cost. (I doubt it, since print on demand companies can produce a book for only hundreds of dollars, but okay.) But the cost of producing the ebook is literally pennies, even including the cost of transmitting the book to a Kindle.
The only obvious reason for the book to sell for $148 is that if the price were a lot less, it would start to cannibalize the sales of the physical book. Springer Verlag, being an established company with massive printing operations, can’t afford to stop running the presses, especially in Germany where it’s damn near impossible to lay people off.
As soon as someone develops a reputation for producing scholarly texts as ebooks, though, Springer will be in trouble.
If it’s a conference proceedings, it’s probably not that great either. Scientists save their latest data for peer-reviewed journals, which are easily accessible online. These books probably have to be produced to meet requirements of the conference funder.
Yup, and it’s stuff that will be republished in a peer-reviewed form later. (One of my old professors had a rule: every result should get one conference talk, one book chapter, and one journal paper.) Mostly these things are purchased by research libraries that figure they need one of everything.
The subset rule for this law is that “If against all odds, a turn does occur, it will be in the wrong direction, and the helmsman at the wheel at the time will be blamed for the ensuing disaster, rather than the dolt who originally steamed straight ahead into the ice pack in the first place”
Having taught AP physics for a few decades, I’ve noticed that the textbook I use gets a new edition almost every year, and I generally get review copies. About the only difference between editions are the order of the problems and minor editing of the text. The differences are just enough so that a student cannot use an older edition to do assignments made by a professor. So, each year everyone has to buy the new text rather than shopping for used. Of course, since my state adopts a text for seven or more years, I am generally issuing a text several editions behind the current one, which works out great for my students because they can buy a copy of the our text online for a song and not have to lug the one I issue home every day. Academic publishing is really quite a racket.
In mathematics and theoretical physics the emerging business model for academic articles is “free-as-in-freedom” (a famous phrase coined by free software developer Richard Stallman).
Most mathematicians and scientists mostly think “free-as-in-freedom” will become the nearly universal model for all academic publishing within the next 5–10 years (although this trend makes for-profit academic publishing companies like Elsevier very nervous).
In academic book publishing (e.g., Cambridge University Press) the emerging trend is “print on demand”. Namely, if you want a physical copy of a book, then we’ll print one just for you. This is helpful for specialized books that (as happens very often) sell only a few dozen copies per year.
How long will this “free-as-in-freedom” trend take to trickle down to the high school and elementary school level? My guess is, about 10 years … that’s how long it will take to develop high quality, color, cheap, fast e-ink displays.
How do these events relate to the usual liberal-versus-conservative dichotomy? They don’t fit at all … not really … the rules are changing faster than either liberal or conservative ideology can adapt.
For sure, Thomas Jefferson would approve of this immense burgeoning of free-as-in-freedom access to knowledge … because Jefferson was famously more proud of having founded the University of Virginia than of having been elected President!
Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society
(all articles are free-as-in-freedom)
URL: http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/2011-48-03/
I suspect you’re right, or nearly so. Kindle does a miserable job with mathematics right now, because it’s basically got a very limited, roughly Netscape 1.5 HTML rendering engine in there. Complicated math ends up being rendered as images and the images don’t work well. (I bought a book on Galois fields that was just almost unreadable on my Kindle, although it’s not bad on a big screen in the Kindle for Mac app. And I’ve actually returned a few books that were unreadable.) (To return a book, you have to go to Kindle customer service on line and ask for the return. They’re usually very quick about okaying it, and the money is back in minutes.)
I think the magic price point will be 99¢ or up to a couple dollars, though — it does actually require some effort to make a viable ebook. Still, I used to spend $300 in a semester on textbooks and that was many years ago — making it $10-$20 would be fine.
AMS is a little bit of a special case, because they want everything in LaTeX or AMSLaTeX anyway; you get the penalty copy typeset for you by the authors. If Kindle could manage to really handle a dvi file, that would be very interesting.
You mean “free-as-in-beer” though, John. If the articles were “free-as-in-freedom” they’d come with LaTeX source and the Author’s Instructions wouldn’t say:
You’re correct too Charlie … all of academic publishing is in turmoil right now. Most researcher agree on the main objective: free public access to all scientific knowledge, whether past, present, or future.
The devil (as usual) is in the details of how to ensure that public access … here literally dozens of strategies are being tried … the result right now is a big chaotic mess!
For mathematicians and physicists (who are farthest along this curve), the go-to site is known as “the archive server”, and the defacto practice is to post one’s manuscript on the server, at the same time that one submits it to a journal for peer review. And yes, the LaTeX source code for all arxiv articles is downloadable.
Once submitted, there is *no* erasure allowed … amended versions can be posted, but the original version remains in the archive, unalterably and forever, and accessible to everyone.
I’ve posted a link to the Arxiv below … at present it holds 685,968 articles! For fun I checked that no less than 448 abstracts mention the word “climate” … of which 147 appeared in 2010-11.
Here are two that reach exactly opposite conclusions.
Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications by James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha, and Karina von Schuckmann
Climate Change Policies for the XXIst Century: Mechanisms, Predictions and Recommendations by Igor Khmelinskii and Peter Stallinga
Keep in mind that *none* of these articles are peer-reviewed … anyone can post anything. Needless to say, a very wide range of opinions is represented!
Read for yourself, think for yourself, judge for yourself, is the arxiv’s motto! GOOD!
ARXIV.ORG
URL: http://arxiv.org/
As an example of the *best* the arxiv has to offer, consider McShane and Wyner’s recent “statistical analysis of multiple temperature proxies” (link below).
The article considers the quality of the statistical evidence for “Hockey Stick” graph of global temperature. The authors confine themselves to purely statistical methods — there is no physics whatsoever in their analysis.
Their conclusion boils down to:
(1) With high confidence, a purely statistical analysis establishes that the “blade” of hot temperatures from 1970-present at the end of the Hockey Stick is real.
(2) The purely statistical evidence that the thousand-year “handle” of the Hockey Stick is flat is much weaker—we can’t really say very much about the “handle”.
And very wisely, the authors conclude by reminding readers that “Paleoclimatoligical [sic] reconstructions constitute only one source of evidence in the AGW debate.”
The graphics in their article are very informative—essentially every analysis shows a prominent Hockey Stick “blade” … the variability in the slope and features of the handle are much greater.
So maybe it’s time for PJM/Tatler to accept that the “blade” is real?
A statistical analysis of multiple temperature proxies:
Are reconstructions of surface temperatures over the last 1000 years reliable?
Blakeley B. McShane, Abraham J. Wyner
URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.4002
Forget Springer, Kluwer is the price champion for technical materials. And it’s ironic that there isn’t an electronic edition of TAOCP, although Knuth does make the preliminary fascicles available so that everyone can get their chance at $2.56.