Dear William, dear all,
On Thu, May 02, 2013 at 01:27:30PM -0700, William Stein wrote:
> There is a big series of small books about R that Springer publishes:
>
> http://www.springer.com/series/6991?detailsPage=titles
>
> The editorial director of that series at Springer just talked with me
> on the phone for a while, and he says these are among "Springers best
> selling books"; moreover, he believes they have a major impact on
> making R a really viable platform for computational statistics.
>
> He wants to know if we want to create a series like this for Sage.
> The timing would be good, giving how the level of maturity and
> comprehensive functionality of Sage, at least compared to a few years
> ago. For *this* series, Springer appears amenable to authors
> keeping copyright, and for there being a free (but slightly different)
> web-version of a given book. As a concrete example, the thematic
> tutorial on combinatorics at
>
> http://sagemath.org/doc/reference/combinat/sage/combinat/tutorial.html#
>
> could be expanded into a short book (maybe 100 pages), published by
> Springer, and still have the shorter similar version included with
> Sage. In other words, they are more amenable to flexible copyright
> and distribution with *this* series of books than with many of their
> other more traditional offerings.
>
> If you have something that you could see being polished into a book
> for inclusion in a series called "Use Sage!" for Springer, let me
> know. If there is sufficient interest, then this could help
> substantially with our mission statement: "Create a free open source
> viable alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab." (In
> fact, Springer believes their book series plays a big role in R's
> extreme popularity.)
>
> I've also talked with both the AMS and with O'Reilly about similar
> projects, but it doesn't seem to work out. Also, both publishers
> (especially O'Reilly) seemed much more "allergic" to material in the
> books being partly duplicated online.
It's very good news that Springer is progressively understanding our
needs!
The fun part of the story is that the tutorial above owes a tiny bit
to Springer :-)
A couple years ago, they suggested to Paul Zimmerman to write a book
about Sage in French; he prompted me to write a chapter about
combinatorics; I accepted with the idea of making it eventually into a
thematic tutorial; this dream came true thanks to Hugh Thomas who did
the translation. At the end we did not find a common agreement with
Springer because we wanted to keep our book under a creative commons
license. And we were not more successful with other publishers (it was
not so far a way). But that's all fine because we are just about to
release the first stable version; it will be available as pdf and as
print-on-demand for a cheap price and yet quite good print quality
(around $15; for 500 pages, you can't beat that).
http://sagebook.gforge.inria.fr/
Just some feedback from our experience:
- If I had to redo it, I personally would skip publishers altogether;
they gave us some interesting ideas that improved the book; but in
total it was more a waste of time than anything. print-on-demand
just works and gives you full control on the whole process.
- If you go for a publisher, negotiate hard to keep a CC copyright on
your material, so that others, or even yourself, can build on it;
typically to reuse parts or all of it in Sage's documentation.
- Consider writing chapters of your book as thematic tutorials for Sage.
- Consider translating to English the remaining chapters of our book,
either to make as many new thematic tutorials, or to publish a full
translation. The LaTeX Sources are available on demand. And pandoc
worked quite well to do the conversion to ReST.
- You are very welcome to expand the combinatorics thematic tutorial
and to combine it with other material to make a book out of it. It's
even better if part of the new material is contributed back to the
thematic tutorial.
Cheers,
Nicolas
--
Nicolas M. Thiéry "Isil" <nthi...@users.sf.net>
http://Nicolas.Thiery.name/
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