2015-05-19 2:44 GMT+02:00 Richard Wordingham < [email protected]>:
> > Good books on the subjext are now becoming difficutlt to find (or > > they are more expensive now), and too difficult to use on the web > > (for such very technical topics, it really helps to have a printed > > copy, that you an annotate, explore, or have beside you instead of on > > a screen (and printing ebooks is not an option if they are > > voluminous). May be you have other books to recommend. > > Google Books, in English, gives access to a very helpful chapter on > regular languages in trace monoids in 'the Book of Traces'. > [OT] It's interesting to see that books on this topic were published mostly after 1994. As I terminated my training cursus at this period, the subject was largely not covered before; now that I live in a small city where there's no good scientific library finding just some books in English on such topics is extremely rare (the only books I see are those published in French in the "for Dummies" series and I find them completely ininteresting. As a consequence I buy much less scientific books now. However Wikipedia is not a convenient place for extensive (but progressive) coverage of a topic (the one page limit has a consequence: it's difficult to learn from these articles, and you can read them only if you already know most of its covered topics or you don't need to navigate randomly over many pages through random links). Wikiepdia remains useful only if you can isolate your search to a few smaller subtopics. Wikibooks and Wikisource would be more useful for such extensive studies, but their contents is very small (and for legal resons, Wikisource cannot contain many scientific books about theories that were written after WW2 : unfortunately this covers almost all researches being performed on comuting theories that exploded only after th 1960's, and in many areas the researches were also protected by extensive patents in addition to copyrights; so the interesting books are published in English, extremely rarely translated, have a limited distribution, they are also expensive and not found except in very few libraries and only in some cities that have a scientific university ; public libraries also don't have these books, which are too expensive) Now there's the net, but even Google books only exposes just some pages (for the rest, Google books propose books that are even more expensive than on normal libraries, and from random sellers that are frequently not trustable : e.g. I will never buy anything from Amazon if Amazon is not the seller, or from other similar large platform on which you don't know who is the seller, or because the seller also wants us to pay absive delivery/shipping costs without even giving any warranty on the product and without even allowing us to trace the command; there are too many abusers, or that sell products with severe defects; I prefer using French online selling platforms; in addition this saves money on taxes if the seller is in the EU, otherwise we experiment long delivery delays in tex customs, and we also need to pay the tax on delivery, in addition to the initial cost, plus the currency change fees by the bank; all these can easily double the total cost, but at end there's also a big deception on the product and it's impossible to return it and get a refund) In summary, it is really bad that libraries are disappearing in many places, or are reducd to sell only a limited catalog "for the dummies" or popular books advertized in the medias. The variety of available books for sale is dramatically decreasing now. The net cannot replace these books that you want to read slowly and keep as reference for later reuse... except if the e-books you can buy online offer an option to get a "print on demand" with a good quality with reasonable costs and delays for the delivery (some French editors are proposing this "on demand printing" service, even for books from some other foreign editors). Note that is is not limtied to just scientific books, the system could be used for delivering all kinds of books (including litterature, photography, magazines, newspapers, or rare research papers available only in one public university library that could get some fees helping them to renew their own purchases...)
