[OS X TeX] Why does this hang so = [OT] electronic books

[Victor Ivrii]

On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 3:12 PM, Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa at web.de> wrote:
>

>
> In their interest you should publish your heavy opus electronically and
> weightless as ebook. But be kind: not for Kindle/Amazon. This hardware only
> supports a single format, which no other ebook understands (sounds like M$).
> (A few km south of my home is Frankfurt am Main. A week ago the last book
> fair, a global event, ended. Ebooks were presented as ready for business. I
> don't recall what was told about their usability though...)


Apart of interests of trees there are other advantages of electronic
publishing. However a good question: how to publish digital books?
Sure one can throw pdf file to his/her own webserver and make
reasonable advertisement (assuming that the author does not want to
get any money and for most scientific books possible money gain is so
small that it is not worth of trouble).

However there are too many shortcomings.

(1) Dissemination: as nobody is actually responsible for advertisement
certain part of target audience is missed. It happens pretty often
even with books or articles published in the standard way, but at
least these books are in catalogues

(2) Libraries: any scientific library can pay $100-$200 or more per
copy of the book but try to persuade librarian to download from
internet, burn CD, print and stick label, put in catalogue, put in
stocks

(3) Credits: try to persuade administration that it as good as
printed. Usual talk about peer reviewing even if everybody knows the
current state of peer reviewing

(4) Future: even if it is University webserver nobody promises you to
keep the file for downloading after retirement, leave alone demise.
And one may be ensured that there will be no update to comply with
changed formats

So, are there any solutions to address these concerns at least
partially? Are there any publishers in electronic publishing business?
I am meaning "electronic publishing" not placing on web digital copies
of printed materials


PS Definitely this should not be in this mailing list - but the whole
topic belongs rather to texhax anyway. So, I am just using opportunity
to asks such questions in meagre hope that there are answers

Victor


>
> --
> Greetings
>
>  Pete
>

>



-- 
========================
Victor Ivrii, Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
http://www.math.toronto.edu/ivrii