On several occasions I have had the following experience. There is some
math book that I consult frequently enough that I decide it would be nice
to have a copy. The book is out of print. I search the web and find that
used copies are selling at exorbitant prices, or sometimes are not available
at all. I am sure that many others have had similar experiences.

On occasion I have tried to go further. I have contacted Dover Press or
the AMS to try to get them interested in bringing the book back into print.
Dover has always ignored me or filtered me out with a boilerplate response.
The AMS has been better, but is often at a loss to know whether it should
take the financial risk. An additional complication is that sometimes the
author of the book has unwittingly signed over the rights to the original
publisher, who does not want to relinquish the rights but also does not
want to bring the book back into print.

It occurs to me that one way to help address this problem would be to create
a website or Wiki where consumers of math books could "vote" for which books
they would like to see come back into print. Anyone could propose a book,
or add their support to a book that someone else has proposed. Although
imperfect, the website would be a useful source of information to publishers
such as the AMS that would be better than what they have now. (For example,
I recently tried to persuade them to reprint Dominic Welsh's "Matroid
Theory." Their only method of assessing demand was to ask a few experts
for their personal opinions. The experts said, without any supporting
evidence, that matroid theory is not very active, and that the existence of
Oxley's book means that nobody wants to buy Welsh's book. When I responded
with (1) statistics from MathSciNet showing that matroid theory is thriving;
(2) high prices for Welsh's book on bookfinder.com, demonstrating demand;
(3) quotes from Oxley's introduction, praising Welsh's book and saying that
Oxley's book did not supersede Welsh's; (4) the relatively high sales rank
of Lawler's matroid theory book, recently brought back into print by Dover;
they were surprised. It had not occurred to them to seek out such information
about the potential demand for the book.)

Unfortunately, I personally don't have the technical expertise to set up such
a website, but surely other readers of this newsgroup do. If you think this
is a good idea and are willing to set up at least a prototype website, then
please post the link to this newsgroup.

Tim Chow
--
Tim Chow tchow-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu
The range of our projectiles---even ... the artillery---however great, will
never exceed four of those miles of which as many thousand separate us from
the center of the earth. ---Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences

On Apr 15, 12:24 pm, wrote:
On several occasions I have had the following experience. There is some
math book that I consult frequently enough that I decide it would be nice
to have a copy. The book is out of print. I search the web and find that
used copies are selling at exorbitant prices, or sometimes are not available
at all. I am sure that many others have had similar experiences.

On occasion I have tried to go further. I have contacted Dover Press or
the AMS to try to get them interested in bringing the book back into print.
Dover has always ignored me or filtered me out with a boilerplate response.
The AMS has been better, but is often at a loss to know whether it should
take the financial risk. An additional complication is that sometimes the
author of the book has unwittingly signed over the rights to the original
publisher, who does not want to relinquish the rights but also does not
want to bring the book back into print.

It occurs to me that one way to help address this problem would be to create
a website or Wiki where consumers of math books could "vote" for which books
they would like to see come back into print. Anyone could propose a book,
or add their support to a book that someone else has proposed. Although
imperfect, the website would be a useful source of information to publishers
such as the AMS that would be better than what they have now. (For example,
I recently tried to persuade them to reprint Dominic Welsh's "Matroid
Theory." Their only method of assessing demand was to ask a few experts
for their personal opinions. The experts said, without any supporting
evidence, that matroid theory is not very active, and that the existence of
Oxley's book means that nobody wants to buy Welsh's book. When I responded
with (1) statistics from MathSciNet showing that matroid theory is thriving;
(2) high prices for Welsh's book on bookfinder.com, demonstrating demand;
(3) quotes from Oxley's introduction, praising Welsh's book and saying that
Oxley's book did not supersede Welsh's; (4) the relatively high sales rank
of Lawler's matroid theory book, recently brought back into print by Dover;
they were surprised. It had not occurred to them to seek out such information
about the potential demand for the book.)

Unfortunately, I personally don't have the technical expertise to set up such
a website, but surely other readers of this newsgroup do. If you think this
is a good idea and are willing to set up at least a prototype website, then
please post the link to this newsgroup.

Tim Chow
--
Tim Chow tchow-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu
The range of our projectiles---even ... the artillery---however great, will
never exceed four of those miles of which as many thousand separate us from
the center of the earth. ---Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences


Setting up a web site to elicit suggestions for bringing a work back
into print, and for accumulating data in support of doing so is a
useful, but probably not very effective step. The facts a (1)
mathematics books, for typographical reasons in particular, are time-
consuming and difficult to prepare for print, and even with the best
OCR software available, would produce text of sometimes marginal
quality (take a look at some of the products in Kessinger Publishing's
Rare Reprints); (2) the mathematics book market is comparatively
limited (considering that even the AMS has to ask about the cost-
effectiveness of producing titles); and (3) it is uncertain how to
establish and maintain participation in a web site to recommend and
vote for the reprinting of titles, without enthusiastic support for
such a project, and, in any case, the data collected from such a web
site is likely to be essentially anecdotal and unconvincing to
publishers.

An alternative, or perhaps supplementary, route to creation of a
"want" list web site would be for those willing and able to
participate to put together something like the Gutenberg e-book
project. This would require a core of volunteers who would be willing
to check on the copyright status of proposed titles, to scan books
into an electronic data base, serve as proofreaders and editors to
ensure that the electronic texts produced were accurate in respect to
typography, etc., to organize the volunteers who would work on these
projects, to establish, organize, and maintain a host site for storage
and retrieval of the titles so produced. It seems that this kind of on-
going project would take a big commitment of time and work on the part
of organizers and volunteers, and perhaps the financial backing of
institutions and individuals to help acquire material for reprinting
and to finance a host computer and associated website and the
equipment, hardware and software, required to make the project
feasible.

Irving H. Anellis

Since most mathematics books are out of print, including some very
important books, every mathematician probably has the experience of
not being able to buy a book at a reasonable price. Worse, many
mathematicians are unable to obtain access to a book at all because
they don't have easy access to one of the large libraries.

The solution, however, lies with the authors. Until recently, all
publishers required that authors give them the copyright of work
before they would publish it. However, there is a tradition that
publishers will return the copyright to the author once the work is
out of print if requested. For example, I had no problem at all
getting back the copyright to a book of mine from Elsevier, and I even
managed (with some difficulty) to get permission from Elsevier to post
a scan a conference proceedings I had co-edited.

Once the author has the copyright, it is a simple matter to scan it
and post a pdf file on the web (see http://www.jmilne.org/math/Books/scan.html).
Alternatively, the author can probably request Google to make their
scan available.

Of course, a bound copy is to be preferred, but print-on-demand
publishers (e.g., Lulu) will print a copy of book if you send them the
files. Better, the author can send them the files and make it
possible for everyone to order a copy.

J.S. Milne

In article ,
"J.S. Milne" wrote:

Since most mathematics books are out of print, including some very
important books, every mathematician probably has the experience of
not being able to buy a book at a reasonable price. Worse, many
mathematicians are unable to obtain access to a book at all because
they don't have easy access to one of the large libraries.

The solution, however, lies with the authors. Until recently, all
publishers required that authors give them the copyright of work
before they would publish it. However, there is a tradition that
publishers will return the copyright to the author once the work is
out of print if requested.

This will be difficult to do if the author, too, is out of print.

--
Gerry Myerson ) (i - u for email)

Gerry Myerson writes:



In article ,
"J.S. Milne" wrote:

Since most mathematics books are out of print, including some very
important books, every mathematician probably has the experience of
not being able to buy a book at a reasonable price. Worse, many
mathematicians are unable to obtain access to a book at all because
they don't have easy access to one of the large libraries.

The solution, however, lies with the authors. Until recently, all
publishers required that authors give them the copyright of work
before they would publish it. However, there is a tradition that
publishers will return the copyright to the author once the work is
out of print if requested.

This will be difficult to do if the author, too, is out of print.

That might depend on the discipline. Old number theorists, for
instance, never go out of print; they're just remaindered.

Lee Rudolph

On Apr 17, 10:17 am, irvanellis wrote:
On Apr 15, 12:24 pm, wrote:

An alternative, or perhaps supplementary, route to creation of a
"want" list web site would be for those willing and able to
participate to put together something like the Gutenberg e-book
project. This would require a core of volunteers who would be willing
to check on the copyright status of proposed titles, to scan books
into an electronic data base, serve as proofreaders and editors to
ensure that the electronic texts produced were accurate in respect to
typography, etc., to organize the volunteers who would work on these
projects, to establish, organize, and maintain a host site for storage
and retrieval of the titles so produced.

In case it's of interest, Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
("DP", at http://www.pgdp.net/c/ ) already has this infrastructure set
up. Because of US copyright law, DP normally only processes books
published prior to 1923. There are sister sites in Europe and Canada,
subject to corresponding copyright laws.

Several LaTeX projects are slowly wending their way through DP. Most
are late-19th/early-20th Century school books on arithmetic and
algebra, but occasionally one sees titles possibly of some interest to
this group, "Le calcul des rŽsidus et ses applications ˆ la thŽorie
des fonctions" by Lindelšf and "Theorie der Abel'schen Functionen" by
Weierstrass, for example. The selection is governed entirely by the
content providers, who most likely are not mathematicians, but
bibliophiles. Many of DP's "interesting" mathematical projects come
from page scans of university libraries. There's an unfilled content-
provision niche for mathematics, with a lot of low-hanging fruit.

The OCR problem Irving mentions is completely correct in my
experience, by the way; math turns to ASCII hash, and usually must be
typed in from scratch. Unfortunately, LaTeX-knowledgeable volunteers
are in short supply at DP.

A bit more information about volunteering: Setting up a DP account
takes only a few minutes, costs nothing, and has no commercial
entanglements. There's a small learning curve, since the work is
separated into proofreading and formatting stages, with consistency
conventions governing the tasks done at each stage. The work itself is
done in a web browser one page at a time, so the time commitment can
be as little as a few minutes a day.
--
Andy http://mathcs.holycross.edu/~ahwang

I wonder if this whole question will be obsolete in
five years, precisely because people like Tim Chow
are beginning to write things like this and technology
is evolving. You won't contact a publisher to ask
them to bring it into print; you'll just place your
order electronically and it will get printed to order
and shipped without the conscious attention of anyone
besides you. -- Mike Hardy


wrote:

On several occasions I have had the following experience. There is some
math book that I consult frequently enough that I decide it would be nice
to have a copy. The book is out of print. I search the web and find that
used copies are selling at exorbitant prices, or sometimes are not available
at all. I am sure that many others have had similar experiences.

On occasion I have tried to go further. I have contacted Dover Press or
the AMS to try to get them interested in bringing the book back into print.
Dover has always ignored me or filtered me out with a boilerplate response.
The AMS has been better, but is often at a loss to know whether it should
take the financial risk. An additional complication is that sometimes the
author of the book has unwittingly signed over the rights to the original
publisher, who does not want to relinquish the rights but also does not
want to bring the book back into print.

It occurs to me that one way to help address this problem would be to create
a website or Wiki where consumers of math books could "vote" for which books
they would like to see come back into print. Anyone could propose a book,
or add their support to a book that someone else has proposed. Although
imperfect, the website would be a useful source of information to publishers
such as the AMS that would be better than what they have now. (For example,
I recently tried to persuade them to reprint Dominic Welsh's "Matroid
Theory." Their only method of assessing demand was to ask a few experts
for their personal opinions. The experts said, without any supporting
evidence, that matroid theory is not very active, and that the existence of
Oxley's book means that nobody wants to buy Welsh's book. When I responded
with (1) statistics from MathSciNet showing that matroid theory is thriving;
(2) high prices for Welsh's book on bookfinder.com, demonstrating demand;
(3) quotes from Oxley's introduction, praising Welsh's book and saying that
Oxley's book did not supersede Welsh's; (4) the relatively high sales rank
of Lawler's matroid theory book, recently brought back into print by Dover;
they were surprised. It had not occurred to them to seek out such information
about the potential demand for the book.)

Unfortunately, I personally don't have the technical expertise to set up such
a website, but surely other readers of this newsgroup do. If you think this
is a good idea and are willing to set up at least a prototype website, then
please post the link to this newsgroup.

Tim Chow
--
Tim Chow tchow-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu
The range of our projectiles---even ... the artillery---however great, will
never exceed four of those miles of which as many thousand separate us from
the center of the earth. ---Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences

In article , I wrote:
It occurs to me that one way to help address this problem would be to
create a website or Wiki where consumers of math books could "vote" for
which books they would like to see come back into print. Anyone could
propose a book, or add their support to a book that someone else has
proposed.

Klaus Schmid decided to create a prototype site:

http://outofprintmath.blogspot.com

I encourage everyone to try it out, add their own books, and post feedback
to sci.math.research.

It has also occurred to me that an alternative approach is to convince an
existing book website to add such a feature to their site. People who
search for an out-of-print book (not necessarily mathematics) could submit
a vote to have the book made available again (either through conventional
publishing or on-demand publishing). The running tally would be displayed
for everyone to see. I contacted several book websites with this idea;
the most famous ones essentially ignored me, but Booksprice.com and
Fetchbook.info liked the idea and said that they would put it on their
todo list. Anyway, regardless of whether they actually get around to
adding this feature to their site, I expect that experimenting with an
actual prototype like Klaus's will yield valuable information about whether
this idea has merit and if so, what needs to be done to make it work well.
--
Tim Chow tchow-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu
The range of our projectiles---even ... the artillery---however great, will
never exceed four of those miles of which as many thousand separate us from
the center of the earth. ---Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences

In article , I wrote:
Klaus Schmid decided to create a prototype site:

http://outofprintmath.blogspot.com

I encourage everyone to try it out, add their own books, and post feedback
to sci.math.research.

Schmid's site has reached the 100-title mark now. It is interesting to see
which titles have the most votes. The top titles seem to be number theory
texts: Cassels and Frohlich, Borevich and Shafarevich, Artin (Class Field
Theory).

A colleague just alerted me to the fact that a short blurb about Schmid's
site has appeared on the Slashdot Firehose.

http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=813057

If you're a Slashdot subscriber and like Schmid's site, please click on
the + sign above the blurb to increase the chances that the story will
be selected by the Slashdot editors for publication.
--
Tim Chow tchow-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu
The range of our projectiles---even ... the artillery---however great, will
never exceed four of those miles of which as many thousand separate us from
the center of the earth. ---Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences