["Followup-To:" header set to gmane.comp.mathematics.sage.devel.] On 2013-05-06, rjf <fate...@gmail.com> wrote: > ------=_Part_1579_8214636.1367802043271 > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 > > > > 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?
R is often used to teach statistics at universities, so there may be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of installations around. Here are the Amazon data on "Introductory Time Series with R (Use R!)" published by Springer (272 pages, 45$) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #72,412 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) Statistical or "R by Example (Use R!)" (350+ pages, 44$) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #72,627 in Books which looks good to me. But notice that "The Art of R Programming: A Tour of Statistical Software Design" published by No Starch Press fares much better: (400pages, 25$) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,454 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) Mathematics Note that "R Cookbook (O'Reilly Cookbooks)" (400+ pages, 25$) has even better scores: Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,835 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) IMHO this data shows that Springer wants to charge much more for its books (and its sales are perhaps 10 times less, at least on Amazon, see http://www.fonerbooks.com/surfing.htm), for reasons that do not look convincing to me. Looks like Springer behaves in this market as Apple in personal computers, charging more for reasons not always clear... Dima -- 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.
