There were plans for a translation of the French book, and I think I volunteered to work on that about 2 years ago, so I want to apologise for having done nothing. (At the time my old laptop could not run SageTeX and at that point I gave up).
If we had enough volunteers to do a chapter each collectively that would be a lot less daunting a task. John On 3 May 2013 02:52, Nicolas M. Thiery <nicolas.thi...@u-psud.fr> wrote: > Dear William, dear all, > > On Thu, May 02, 2013 at 01:27:30PM -0700, William Stein wrote: >> 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. >> >> He wants to know if we want to create a series like this for Sage. >> The timing would be good, giving how the level of maturity and >> comprehensive functionality of Sage, at least compared to a few years >> ago. For *this* series, Springer appears amenable to authors >> keeping copyright, and for there being a free (but slightly different) >> web-version of a given book. As a concrete example, the thematic >> tutorial on combinatorics at >> >> http://sagemath.org/doc/reference/combinat/sage/combinat/tutorial.html# >> >> could be expanded into a short book (maybe 100 pages), published by >> Springer, and still have the shorter similar version included with >> Sage. In other words, they are more amenable to flexible copyright >> and distribution with *this* series of books than with many of their >> other more traditional offerings. >> >> If you have something that you could see being polished into a book >> for inclusion in a series called "Use Sage!" for Springer, let me >> know. If there is sufficient interest, then this could help >> substantially with our mission statement: "Create a free open source >> viable alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab." (In >> fact, Springer believes their book series plays a big role in R's >> extreme popularity.) >> >> I've also talked with both the AMS and with O'Reilly about similar >> projects, but it doesn't seem to work out. Also, both publishers >> (especially O'Reilly) seemed much more "allergic" to material in the >> books being partly duplicated online. > > It's very good news that Springer is progressively understanding our > needs! > > The fun part of the story is that the tutorial above owes a tiny bit > to Springer :-) > > A couple years ago, they suggested to Paul Zimmerman to write a book > about Sage in French; he prompted me to write a chapter about > combinatorics; I accepted with the idea of making it eventually into a > thematic tutorial; this dream came true thanks to Hugh Thomas who did > the translation. At the end we did not find a common agreement with > Springer because we wanted to keep our book under a creative commons > license. And we were not more successful with other publishers (it was > not so far a way). But that's all fine because we are just about to > release the first stable version; it will be available as pdf and as > print-on-demand for a cheap price and yet quite good print quality > (around $15; for 500 pages, you can't beat that). > > http://sagebook.gforge.inria.fr/ > > Just some feedback from our experience: > > - If I had to redo it, I personally would skip publishers altogether; > they gave us some interesting ideas that improved the book; but in > total it was more a waste of time than anything. print-on-demand > just works and gives you full control on the whole process. > > - If you go for a publisher, negotiate hard to keep a CC copyright on > your material, so that others, or even yourself, can build on it; > typically to reuse parts or all of it in Sage's documentation. > > - Consider writing chapters of your book as thematic tutorials for Sage. > > - Consider translating to English the remaining chapters of our book, > either to make as many new thematic tutorials, or to publish a full > translation. The LaTeX Sources are available on demand. And pandoc > worked quite well to do the conversion to ReST. > > - You are very welcome to expand the combinatorics thematic tutorial > and to combine it with other material to make a book out of it. It's > even better if part of the new material is contributed back to the > thematic tutorial. > > Cheers, > Nicolas > -- > Nicolas M. Thiéry "Isil" <nthi...@users.sf.net> > http://Nicolas.Thiery.name/ > > -- > 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. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. 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