[Axiom-math] RE: [Axiom-developer] publishing the axiom book

[Bill Page]

All,

Tim, thanks very much for laying out the detailed plans for
publishing the new Axiom book (books?). I hope we hear from
several people willing to help. I will definitely be one of
them.

There is now a web page on MathAction to help document our
decisions and plans for the publishing project: 

http://page.axiom-developer.org/zope/mathaction/AxiomBook

It is open for editing and comments to all. Comments and updates
would be most appreciated!

On Sunday, November 28, 2004 1:48 AM Tim Daly wrote:

> ...
> 
> It would be nice if we could figure out a way to get lulu.com
> to either create and ship CDs with the book or possibly just
> ship CDs we make for them. I don't see anything on their site
> about it but it's always fun to be the first, right?

Apparently this is quite possible. When asked about his experience
with Lulu, Robert Kiehn (an established Lulu author, see my
previous email) recently wrote to me:

> Lulu does not print over 700 pages.
> You will need to divide the work into 2 volumes
> The Printing cost paper back is about 4.50 base plus 2 cents
> a page.
> There are NO up front costs.
> You add  on what ever royalty you want.  They get 20% - you
> get 80 % of the royalty that you decide.
> You can design the covers.
> You keep all copyrights.  (meaning that you can quit Lulu
> anytime) You do not have to buy copies from them, they construct
> them on demand and bill the customer for shipping and costs and
> royalties, and send you a check for your 80% of the royalties.
> However, they are now offering hard back copies in print runs
> of over 100.
> You can also add a CD ROM to the fly leaf.
> ***
> I do not think you can get a better deal.
> 

So yes, we can add a copy of Axiom on CDrom to each book!

> 
> Given the size of chapter 9 we might consider splitting the
> book into two parts, one a users guide and one a reference manual.
> I leave that up for discussion and debate.
>

Yes! I am very much in favour of this idea. I think even the older
Jenks and Sutor book was too large for most purposes. Perhaps we
could go one step further and further divide the volumes into

- Basic Axiom - a beginning user's guide
- Advanced Axiom - user's guide
- Axiom Reference - complete reference manual

Besides the page limit that Robert Kiehn mentioned above, another
good reason is "marketing". We could plan to keep the Basic Axiom
book reasonable short and even lower in price, say < $25. The
others could be priced a little higher. Making this division might
also let us put something in print sooner.

Regards,
Bill Page.