Resurrecting out-of-print math books

In article <56932a9e-90de-4bdc-929c-3b913426906d@34g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>,
Mitch <maharri@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Jul 14, 10:21 am, tc...@lsa.umich.edu wrote:
>> At my suggestion, Klaus Schmid has set up a prototype website at
>>
>> http://outofprintmath.blogspot.com
>>
>> where anyone can suggest a title, and vote for titles that others have
>> suggested. The site tallies votes and displays the total for everyone
>> to see. I encourage everyone to visit the site and participate.
[...]
>Usenet is not the most widely read thing in the world...where are other
>places to advertise? Slashdot? Where else?

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.

By the way, 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).
--
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 <489b35c0$0$303$b45e6eb0@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu>, I wrote:
>By the way, 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).

Just for fun, I decided to compile a list of the "hottest" books on the
list as of this morning, ranked by the number of "highly" votes, with
30 votes as an arbitrary cutoff:

82 Cassels and Frohlich, Algebraic number theory
76 Borevich and Shafarevich, Number theory
69 Artin and Tate, Class field theory
68 Feynman and Hibbs, Quantum mechanics and path integrals
64 Csiszar and Korner, Information theory
59 Welsh, Matroid theory
59 Riordan, Combinatorial identities
59 Whitehead, Elements of homotopy theory
58 Kuratowski, Topology
55 Mac Lane, Mathematics: Form and Function
54 Dugundji, Topology
52 Arbarello, Geometry of algebraic curves
46 Groetschel et al., Geometric algorithms and combinatorial optimization
43 Conway, Regular algebra and finite machines
39 Grunbaum and Shephard, Tilings and patterns
39 Weyl, The concept of a Riemann surface
38 Curtis and Reiner, Methods of representation theory
37 Platonov and Rapinchuk, Algebraic groups and number theory
36 Lovasz and Plummer, Matching theory
35 Erdelyi, Higher transcendental functions
34 Huppert, Finite groups
34 Gunning, Lectures on Riemann surfaces
33 Mumford, Abelian varieties
33 Weinstein, Examples of groups
32 Carter, Finite groups of Lie type
31 Simpson, Subsystems of second-order arithmetic
--
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 <080820081322358825%edgar@math.ohio-state.edu.invalid>,
G. A. Edgar <edgar@math.ohio-state.edu.invalid> wrote:
>So, let's say they brought Dugundji back into print at a price
>something like $106.24 ... would they sell many copies? Would it
>matter whether they would sell many copies?
[...]
>So ... if this were in print at $120.00 (about 20 cents a page), would
>many people buy it? Presumably any libraries at research universities
>that don't already have it would. But who else?

Certainly, how well the book sells matters to whoever is putting in the
effort to make the book available. It has to be worth their while.

However, I don't think that a book necessarily has to sell a lot of copies
to be "worth it." Suppose that you, as a professor with a strong interest
in general topology, know (or strongly suspect) that you could sell at
least 50 copies of Dugundji worldwide at $40 a copy (to grad students,
professors, and libraries). You might very well spend $2000 to acquire
the copyright and make it available on some print-on-demand site, as a
service to the community.

On the other hand, if you thought that you would sell only 5 copies, then
you might not bother. So it is still worth finding out which books are
more in demand than others.
--
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 <489c636c$0$298$b45e6eb0@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu>,
tchow@lsa.umich.edu wrote:

> In article <489b35c0$0$303$b45e6eb0@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu>, I wrote:
> >By the way, 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).
>
> Just for fun, I decided to compile a list of the "hottest" books on the
> list as of this morning, ranked by the number of "highly" votes, with
> 30 votes as an arbitrary cutoff:

Riordan, Combinatorial identities is on my shelf.
$186.97 at amazon.com.

--
Michael Press

In article <rubrum-26F6FC.21481308082008@news.sf.sbcglobal.net>,
Michael Press <rubrum@pacbell.net> wrote:
>Riordan, Combinatorial identities is on my shelf.
> $186.97 at amazon.com.

I don't see it at Amazon any more---maybe someone just snapped it up---but
several copies are listed at Bookfinder.com, starting at $122.95.
--
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 <489f2142$0$305$b45e6eb0@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu>,
tchow@lsa.umich.edu wrote:

> In article <rubrum-26F6FC.21481308082008@news.sf.sbcglobal.net>,
> Michael Press <rubrum@pacbell.net> wrote:
> >Riordan, Combinatorial identities is on my shelf.
> > $186.97 at amazon.com.
>
> I don't see it at Amazon any more---maybe someone just snapped it up---but
> several copies are listed at Bookfinder.com, starting at $122.95.

The page has changed: "Out of Print--Limited Availability."
Bookfinder lists the 1968 edition at $122.95 to $155.55.
The corrected 1979 edition weighs in at $238.99 to $257.50.

Here is a current amazon.ca listing for the 1968 edition at CDN $300.
<http://www.amazon.ca/Combinatorial-Identities-John-Riordan/dp/0471722758%3FSubscriptionId%3D1NNRF7QZ418V218YP1R2 %26tag%3Dbookfindercom-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165 953%26creativeASIN%3D0471722758>

Borevich and Shafarevich does not seem to be available,
but a scan is.
<http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~brussel/borevich_and_shafarevich.htm>

--
Michael Press

Michael Press <rubrum@pacbell.net> wrote:
>
> Borevich and Shafarevich does not seem to be available, but a scan is.
> <http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~brussel/borevich_and_shafarevich.htm>

That 118.6 Mb pdf is much inferior to the 5.5 Mb djvu version
http://google.com/search?q=borevich+Shafarevich+djvu

On 14 Jul 2008 14:21:40 GMT, tchow@lsa.umich.edu wrote:

>We have all experienced the frustration of discovering that a favorite
>book of ours has gone out of print. Bringing such a book back into print
>is no easy matter. Publishers want some assurance that the book will sell
>well enough for them to recoup the costs of republishing. Even in today's
>world of on-demand publishing, someone (perhaps the author, if still
>alive) still has to go to the trouble of securing the copyright and then
>making the text available. Few will go to such trouble unless they know
>that the book is in demand, and the trouble is that ascertaining the
>demand seems to be difficult.
>
>Fortunately, there is an easy way to estimate demand. At my suggestion,
>Klaus Schmid has set up a prototype website at
>
> http://outofprintmath.blogspot.com
>
>where anyone can suggest a title, and vote for titles that others have
>suggested. The site tallies votes and displays the total for everyone
>to see. I encourage everyone to visit the site and participate.

I wanted to vote for Weyl, /The Concept of a Riemann Surface/,
but the Web page (entry #70 in the list) reads "poll closed".

--
Angus Rodgers
(twirlip@ eats spam; reply to angusrod@)
Contains mild peril