On Thursday, May 2, 2013 1:27:30 PM UTC-7, William wrote: > > Hi Sage-Developers, > > 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. > > > Am I the only one who finds this implausible? Here's an article on R http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html?pagewanted=all and it doesn't mention Springer.
How many copies do you need to be among the best-sellers for Springer? Maybe 3,000? How many copies of R are there, and how many people actually buy a book to use free software? How many would buy a bunch at US$65 each? (Certainly some, but perhaps because the book teaches something other than documenting R. Like statistics, data analysis, etc. ) Regarding just "R" how good is the free documentation available here: http://www.r-project.org/ ? While I would not like to discourage anyone from writing documentation on anything, all the traditional motivations for publication seem to be lacking for a Springer series. Here are some of the traditional motivations. 1. The author hopes to make money from royalties. 2. The author hopes to become famous (or gain tenure) from the book. 3. There is a gap in the literature and the author and publisher wish to remedy this for non-financial reasons, perhaps political, moral, religious; making friends, influencing enemies. 4. Some kind of creative impulse. You may have some other ideas for motivation, but these come to mind. Insisting on Creative Commons means, it seems to me, that you would be working to make sure that the only people who might make money from sales would be Springer. Of course Springer would be biased in favor of ANY way of adding to their list, as long it has some prospect of making some money for them, and they are used to sales of very short runs. It falls short of their activities with journals -- the author surrenders all control in return for no royalty, and Springer charges big bucks for library subscriptions -- but it is something. An intermediate stance, where an author writes a good/popular book and gets paid royalties on sales, is a common although rarely lucrative (for the author) choice. I personally doubt that combinatorics with Sage would be a big seller, but if you have already written it and Springer would like to publish it, and it doesn't interfere with your ownership, it seems like you have nothing to lose. But make sure you don't give away something unintentionally, whether it is right or your valuable time and energy. RJF -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
