An apology

First, I apologize that the book will not be free (as in beer). In fact, it's the opposite of free: $28.95, paperback, 150 pp. It seem the publisher is shooting for business schools and people with expense accounts. Authors and presses are always at cross-odds on this one, I imagine, in that the author always wants as wide a readership as possible while the press wants to maximize profits. My press, which has a lot of really smart people who work full time on coming up with prices, decided that the profit-maximizing scheme is to ignore all the thousands of people out there in Internet-land who wouldn't think twice about buying the book for ten bucks in favor of scoring a few good business school reading lists.

I apologize that the book will not be free (as in speech). I don't think I'm allowed to put a copy online, and will have to ask nicely about doing so when the book is out of print. You'll probably see about three out of nine chapters soon, though. It certainly won't be in any hip new formats like a wiki any time soon, since I don't know how to set one up and am not in the mood to try right now. I like PDFs.

I apologize that the book is in Word format. This would have been a wonderful opportunity to try to talk [name of Institution] into not using a Microsoft product for just once, already. But [name of Institution] has drunk the Kool-ade and come back for seconds. I mean, it's sort of offensive how many things they do manually because Word doesn't do it automatically, but they stick with it anyway. I'm just happy that editor finally broke down and did some of the formatting for me, probably after I mucked it up so much. [Seems that Word has both character styles and paragraph styles, and applying one of each to the same section is an ordeal which was too much for me.]

I apologize that the book won't be out before May. The fight over software patents is going on in Europe now, but I can't really contribute. On a brighter note, it's modestly likely that the debate will be reopened on 2 February, meaning that the full debate will last up to another year. But the whole thing might get resolved next week. Just another source of anxiety in my life.

I don't apologize for choosing a paper book format over faster and freer e-media. You may place equal weight on well-written words regardless of the media, but there are stodgy people who just don't trust it unless it's bound, and a lot of those people are legislators. If 100% of the anti-software patent propoganda is in digital form, the team does itself a disservice.

There's also some logic to the paper book format which we hipsters sometimes pass over. By publication, [Name of Institution] will have given the book to four peer reviewers, two editors, a proofreader, and a fact checker. They're gonna try their darndest to ensure that the book you get has no errors, on both the mechanical and the conceptual scales. For my part, I am totally paranoid about writing the book in a way that I am not about a PDF that I'd put online. It's trivial for me to fix something dumb that I say in a PDF, but there's nothing the future me can do if he cracks open my future book and finds a stream of embarassing I can't believe I said that statements, and that affects how cautiously the current me writes. I've re-read the entire book cover to cover at least two dozen times, and re-read each individual chapter at least that many times again. By contrast, I think I read my dissertation cover to cover about twice.

As a digression, this has a few implications for journals and other presses that are on their way online. The paper is entirely expendable, and good riddance to it, but the effort that goes in to the paper--the author's paranoid revisions, the peer reviews, the editor--all still need to be there to make for a work of lasting relevance and credibility. The fast publications have their place, and I think the people who discredit g>Wikipedia just because it's Wikipedia are morons, but good academic literature requires having people who dedicate themselves to an article and focus their best efforts upon it. [As a further digression, notice how far removed this is from the idea of the peer reviewer who is entirely anonymous and writes only one response to the article and then answers no questions. When the revolution comes, the current peer review system will be the first against the wall, paper or not.]

Readers need to recognize this as well: lots of people assume that if a paper is online, then it hasn't been vetted properly, but a good journal can indeed do good editorial work and then put the results online. We need to train readers to do the basic research to determine whether a journal is well-reviewed or not instead of just assuming paper=good editorial and computer screen=bad. It's hard because it's not black-and-white.

But in the mean time, here in a world of readers who don't put out the effort, I've got a paper book coming out which will impress lots of readers who normally wouldn't take my side of the debate seriously. For the rest of you who would take me seriously to begin with, I apologize that the book has been made relatively inaccessible for the sake of increased credibility to the stodgy.