The n-Category Café

Thanks! Of course, it’s hard for me to compare CUP with anyone else because I’ve never published with anyone else.

From what you say, Lulu has optimal error-correcting features. CUP does do printing on demand — e.g. when I ordered a copy of Adámek and Rosický a few years ago, it was printed as a one-off. So perhaps I could send CUP a corrected version of my PDF and they’d use it for future printings. The errors spotted so far are minor enough that it doesn’t enormously concern me, but it would be interesting to know for general reasons. If we’re really lucky, someone from CUP will read this and tell us.

I haven’t kept a close eye on sales figures, but my impression is that library sales do make up a large proportion (if I had to guess, 50%). Maybe some libraries buy everything in certain series? I don’t know.

I guess something else to consider is peer review. This is not much of a problem for a textbook on a well-established subject like yours, but for a research monograph (I mean a book containing original research) it’s more of a concern. By now the HoTT book has probably been read by multiple people more closely than many referees would read a book, so although it started out with a lot of errors (it was written by a lot of people in a short span of time) a lot of them have been fixed already (I hesitate to say “most”, but the rate of error-finding has decreased dramatically). However, it’s a bit of a special case in that it got a lot of publicity even outside those established in the field and has been used by many people trying to learn about the subject; an arbitrary self-published research book would probably not get read as closely as quickly.

However, I must admit my total ignorance of how (whether?) research monographs published by ordinary publishers are peer-reviewed. Reading an entire book as closely as a referee reads (or ought to read) a research paper is a tall order; do they find people to do it? I think once someone from a publisher asked me to referee a book, but I turned it down so I don’t remember the details; possibly they offered me some free books in return. Is this standard?

Thanks, Simon. I see that most of the discussion centres on the words “relatively little” in the first sentence of the abstract:

This short introduction to category theory is for readers with relatively little mathematical background.

I confess, I wrote that abstract rather quickly the other day, and I’d already regretted the first half of the sentence: I said “short”, but I didn’t mention that the thing’s actually a book. And now that we’re talking about the second half of the sentence, I concede that the word “relatively” is carrying a lot of weight. If I revise the arXiv submission, I should make the prerequisites more explicit.

On occasion I’ve looked at online reviews of math textbooks (from just-beyond-calculus undergraduate level through beginning graduate level) on Amazon and similar sites, and found that most of the reviews are not written by any of the audiences for which the books are mostly written: instructors teaching from them (or using them as supplemental resources for teaching), students taking classes based on them, or more advanced mathematics students or mathematicians using them as a reference. Instead, the reviews tend to be written by the kind of people participating in that hacker news discussion: people to whom Tom’s “relatively little mathematical background” appears quite substantial, who are looking for resources for independent self-study. And of course those readers judge the books by their usefulness for that purpose.

I don’t really know what the goals and motivations of these readers are; presumably they vary a lot from case to case. But I imagine it’s a rather under-served market.

There’s a bit of discussion going on over at hacker news.

That group is basically computer programmers some of which aren’t interested in abstract theories and many of whom don’t have the undergraduate education of Tom’s target audience: abstract algebra (groups, rings, vector spaces, topology)

I expected there would be more complaints that Tom didn’t include categorical example of things they are more familiar with such as logic and data structure like things (partial orders, monoids, graphs).

Steve Awodey’s book Category Theory gives better coverage of those topics. Maybe someone could edit Tom’s book to include a lot of CS examples.

Or maybe computer people could learn basic abstract algebra from Aluffi’s book Algebra. 0, which teaches algebra as category theory so they could understand the example in Tom’s book. ;)

(In looking at the hacker news discussion I came across Pijul a new and in development version control system claiming to be based on this categorical analysis: arXiv: A Categorical Theory of Patches. I know nothing about Pijul but hopefully it provides a better conceptual model than Git)

Similarly AMS Open Math Notes

those are only slightly similar. They are PDFs that are free to download. Their only difference from all other free PDFs on the web is that they have been approved by the AMS.

Tom also provides the source to his book and permission to modify it to create new versions.

Thanks for that.

David Roberts brought up the “noncommercial” aspect a while ago, making objections that I think were similar to those in your link. I don’t have a strong opinion. The noncommercial clause was requested by CUP, and that seemed natural to me: otherwise another publisher could simply take my text, bind it and sell it in competition with CUP.

I once thought that way too. But I’ve since realized that it’s a little more subtle than that.

There are strong reasons for allowing commercial use of free software, as the GPL does. However, not all of those reasons apply to books and other creative works. For one thing, it’s a lot harder to make a living off of free-as-in-beer books by selling technical support.

Also, the mutual incompatibility of CC-SA and CC-NC-SA is cited as one of the reasons to choose SA. But actually, it cuts both ways: if you want to participate in a sharing ecosystem where the majority of people are using CC-NC-SA (some of them perhaps because it was requested by a publisher, as Tom mentions), then you have to use NC too.

Another problem is that all the CC-SA licenses appear to be somewhat broken (relative to, say, the GFDL, although that is arguably broken in its own way) in not requiring redistribution of an editable form. As far as I can tell, with a CC-BY-SA license it would be perfectly legal for someone else to take the LaTeX source, modify it, and release the compiled PDFs of their modified version but not their modified LaTeX source, which arguably defeats the whole purpose of “Share-Alike”. A NC doesn’t really address this problem, but it does remove any financial incentive for abusing the spirit of the licence in such a way.

Hi Karl,

The book’s released under a Creative Commons licence that allows you to edit [the source from the arXiv] and redistribute it, just as long as you state the authorship accurately, don’t use it for commercial purposes, and preserve the licence.

So anyone who has the capability is allowed to convert it to EPUB for the world to benefit, and in fact I encourage anyone reading who knows how, to do so. I don’t know how fiddly this is, and if Tom has plans, but you aren’t restricted to waiting for him.

As David says, anyone’s free to make an EPUB version if they want to! I don’t have any plans to do so myself, but in the unlikely event that someone else does it, please let us know here.

See for instance tex4ebook, which can be used to produce epub3 format ebooks, which supports MathML.