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Greg Bernhardt submitted a new PF Insights post
The Birth of a Textbook
Continue reading the Original PF Insights Post.
The Birth of a Textbook
Continue reading the Original PF Insights Post.
vanhees71 said:One naughty question: Was the publishing process really so smooth? I heard from a colleague about publishing a textbook with another publisher that the production part was (or better said still is) awful. His carefully LaTeX-written book got totally cluttered in the process by putting it from LaTeX/pdf to some other format (I guess xml?).
Just as a heads-up to everyone, PF has been given a few copies to be used as promotional prizes in contests starting with next week's photo contest, which starts tomorrow. However, depending on shipping costs, the contest may have to be restricted to US addresses for receiving the prize. Greg is investigating.vanhees71 said:Congratulations @Orodruin ! I think, I'll get a copy :-)).
I am very jealous. My author copies did not arrive yet (and are being shipped to my work address and I am out for x-mas). I will have to take your word for the impressiveness.Greg Bernhardt said:I have a copy
Do you really want to know that?ZapperZ said:All I want to know is how much epidural that you took to give birth to this book.
Zz.
I think the idea of the publisher is to offer the solutions manual to teachers who adopt the course.smodak said:Congratulations @Orodruin ! I might get a copy :-)). If I do though, how do I obtain a solution manual?
CRC Press homepage said:A solutions manual and figure slides are available upon qualifying course adoption
I am an enthusiast - neither a teacher, nor a student. A solution manual would be very useful for self-learners like me.Orodruin said:I think the idea of the publisher is to offer the solutions manual to teachers who adopt the course.
To be honest, I do not have much control over how the publisher handles the solutions manual. Contractually, you might be surprised at what the author does not really control such as the title and the cover. However, I must say that they always listened to my opinion with regards to those decisions (for example, I was asked about the cover art and they readily accepted my idea).smodak said:I am an enthusiast - neither a teacher, nor a student. A solution manual would be very useful for self-learners like me.
Not that I am aware of. At least not at the present time.atyy said:Is there any way to buy it in electronic format?
Again, this is not something I can control and I do not know if the preview is created by Amazon or the publishers. My best guess is that whoever does it has not gotten to that point yet. Other CRC Press books on Amazon do have the look inside feature.strangerep said:On the Amazon page for your book, it doesn't seem to offer the "Look Inside" feature?
I hope that's not intentional, and that this feature will be enabled in the near future. (I almost never buy books any more unless I can "look inside" first.)
Well, my colleague finished the book about a year ago and is still struggling with the production process, with several rounds of disappointing proofs he gets back, and the process is very slow. Of course, also in his case, he worked with LaTeX, and the result looks very good (as expected from LaTeX), but obviously the production office transfers it to another system (maybe xml), and already their things can get easily worse. The last proofs he got had completely mixed references like pointing to wrong equations, cluttering the literature/reference lists etc. etc. It's annoying technical things that all work well with his LaTeX version (also using a style provided by the publisher, i.e., it looks indeed like the books of this publisher). I don't understand, why they do not simply take directly the pdf from the LaTeX and print it. They also publish it as ebook. With this publishing company, my experience with the ebooks they offer is that you can use the pdf version only anyway. The epub versions, I've seen, are all failures, particularly leading to bad quality of formulae up to the degree of unreadability.Orodruin said:I honestly do not have anything bad to say about the publishing process itself. For me it all went very smoothly. Of course, my sample of publishers is limited here, but for me there was never any question with the publisher of using anything other than LaTeX and the template I was asked to use worked well and (to me) gave an aesthetically pleasing result. The few issues I had regarding the template were resolved within at most a few days by their LaTeX support (as well as some other minor technicalities I asked about). When did your colleague write his book? Things may have changed over time or simply vary among publishers.
I believe that this is essentially what CRC Press does (at least in my case). I provided a print ready pdf according to their style files, they add the necessary surrounding pages (such as the copyright notes etc) and print it. To be honest, I clearly prefer this way and I am sorry for your colleague's problems. For me the process was very streamlined. The proofreaders read my pdf and provided me with their comments rather than making changes to the pdf. Whenever I did not agree on some comment in the proofs it was open for discussion. I made the changes I agreed with, which I think improved the text, and made my case for why the other changes should not be made or why I proposed a different change. They accepted all such arguments.vanhees71 said:I don't understand, why they do not simply take directly the pdf from the LaTeX and print it.
vanhees71 said:Recently I finished my habilitation thesis. I wrote it in LaTeX without any trouble, including two reference lists, a lot of formulae and figures and putting the published papers at the end (it's a socalled "cumulative habilitation", where you write a longer review-like summary of the published papers of the subject and then attach these papers). Of course, I didn't do the printing with a publisher but just sent my pdf to the university printing office, who also bound it for a very good price. It's of course not as nice as a real book, but at least all typos and mistakes are my own and not that of some production office of a publisher...
vanhees71 said:I don't understand, why they do not simply take directly the pdf from the LaTeX and print it.