I totally agree but students tend to these illegal copies because the prices are unaffordable. I hope authors take some actions and force publishers to not indulge too much in this game.
It's interesting to compare prices. When I was a first-year student in 1970 I bought baby Rudin for $15. It's now at least ten times that, but inflation has been far worse than 1000%. (One can look at college tuition, car prices, any number of things.)
Around that time, my parents bought a mid-size American car for $\$2500$. They are now far more than $\$25,000$ ...
My point is that esoteric textbooks (which everything in math is, beyond calculus) have always been very expensive.
Very little demand.
Authors (like me, for example) spend thousands of hours working to produce a textbook, and we get very little money for that. Again, unless it's a huge-selling market, like calculus. So the alternative is: Stop writing textbooks.
I didn't do it to get rich, and I tried to get the publisher to keep my linear algebra book as one of the cheapest available for that market. My editor agreed, but the boss of the company would not allow it after one year. So, anyhow, I'm done.
There's not much difference in price between superb texts and crap texts.
The crap ones tend to be a bit cheaper, because more people use them.
I didn't know about how the pricing is done. One day I saw one comment on mse to Axler asking him to reduce the price of the text. To that professor Axler responded that he had no control over the prices.
if you are someone like stephen king, maybe you have some control over pricing.
croco: that's the other big thing. as ted noted, the total market for esoterica is small, and then there's the secondary market. not a lot of demand for new.
@Koro But you won't get much business. I went with big publishers to get attention for my books. They have huge staffs who market books. You won't have any of that.
I was miffed to find out that Prentice Hall pushed my algebra book hard the first year it was out and after that they just didn't care. It's still being used a bit, however, 26 years later. But almost entirely used books, I think.
the publisher reps i met reminded me of what i have heard pharmaceutical reps are like. very charming, outgoing, knew almost nothing about the product except why you should buy it.
i was once involved in a case involving a textbook (not math) that was really successful. it had gone through maybe 12 editions in 40 years. there was a lot of that, and attempts to do that, as things were renegotiated.
then there was a coauthor, and then another coauthor, and people died, and it was like a messy divorce except with four or five spouses instead of two.
@TedShifrin I say so because in a way: if the book wasn't written then the publishing house won't get any money. They should give the highest % profit that is possible to the author.
let's hope they never get in a dispute, or if they do, i'm not put on it.
scientific publishing is actually run much more like a business than aspects of 'literary' or 'social science' publishing. at least historically. by now i'm sure it's the same 3 corporations. you'd see these contracts with wine stains on them.
I wonder how many people choose to teach out of my differential geometry text merely because it's free. ... I have it on the AMSNotes website, and someone told me a year ago it was one of the most-downloaded texts there.
It's also on my own UGA website, but that's harder to find unless you're knowing to look for it.
@CroCo Not that I'm aware of. The publishers have all the power.
I've done three well-known publishers; two of the three are huge companies.
some of the 'newer' stuff that is out of copyright is out of copyright for lazy publishers forgetting to file some form in the copyright office in 1970.
that formality is gone now but it did kill a lot of copyrights.
So the publisher/author have to grant permission to Dover to redo things. I actually militated to get Dover to reissue Henry Edwards's Advanced Calculus book.
ted: before 1976 there were shorter terms and also things the owner had to do to maintain the copyright during the term. i think a lot of dover stuff is like that. also maybe with the soviet union nationalizing US copyrights of their authors (there is a specific provision in the law about this, although it doesn't mention the USSR) may have had something to do with it
US copyright law usually looks to national law to see who owns a copyright. so if someone steps into US court and sues over tintin, the court has to figure out what belgian law says happened to herge's copyright. during the cold war with soviet authors, if they did that, soviet law said, the government owns it.
this was a cause of concern because you didn't want the soviet union filing copyright infringement lawsuits to prevent the gulag archipelago or whatever from being printed in the US (which a US copyright owner in the US copyright of the work could normally do)
so they passed a law saying, if a copyright is involuntarily transferred under foreign law, we ignore that. but individual authors in the USSR obviously didn't have the ability to sue.
so, 'public domain' books, i guess? and now it's enough later that none of it matters. i don't think the USSR paid copyright maintenance fees which also would have killed the copyright.
thanks for coming to my talk. you are eligible for continuing legal education credits in the amount of 1.0 units
being bad about royalty payments. i probably can't say more than that. roughly, trying to short change an author
it's a weird area but 'authors' are not a monolith. some benefit very greatly from the system as it currently is. and some are happy enough to throw a PDF on a webpage and aren't doing it for the money
@Koro It is correct, but a bit hard to follow. The order of things is a bit off, and I think some of the steps may be hard for someone who doesn't know what is coming next to follow.
ted this might alarm you. CA attorneys have to do a certain amount of hours of legal education every 3 years. i do talks that are eligible for this credit, and in the last 3 years i've done enough that someone might have gotten 60% of their continuing legal education from me.
it is. they're soon going to close the big duck pond to fix all of its problems, for about a year. they're already cutting down trees. so we have to make the most of it. because the smaller duck pond sucks
i don't know that they're generally a thing? i don't recall growing up with them. i remember seeing ducks in a tiny pond in the square in downtown sonoma, but it was a silly amount of ducks. like five ducks.
I don't see them personally, @leslie, but yes, we have them in the canyons. So very close to me. I apparently had them all around my property in GA, as they offed several of my cats. :(
ted: yes! heartwell is the little duck pond. my daughter likes it (it was her first). it's less well maintained than the photo would suggest. the japanese garden is the site of osprey attacks. el dorado west is the big duck pond (in happier days, as far as that photo makes it seem).
we'll probably go to the koi pond more often. it's very close. except with covid you have to make a reservation so they limit the number of people. it's never a problem, it's just annoying to click on a website before going to a pond.
I do not know that book, Croco. I may have taught out of his precalculus book many years ago, but I honestly do not remember. All the standard calculus books are more or less equally mediocre.
the first problem in the book is to compute the overall reduction of that gear assembly. the author lost his train of thought and forgot it was supposed to be a calculus book.
Well, I've taught plenty of H courses, @leslie. There are those who would argue that Spivak's Calculus and my multivariable math course are hazing, too. shrug
When I had 10-15 students in office hours for different classes, they mostly worked in little groups together and I bounced around (trying not to step on everyone on the floor) giving sage advice. They learned a lot from that. How do you do that on zoom?
Office hours with one or two at a time is very different :)]
Hmm, yeah third quarter I guess is the weird one. Used to be half sequences/series/uniform convergence, half linear algebra, my year they started doing a bit of multi from Spivak but didn't really get anywhere lol.
Things are going well! Just finished first week of the semester, classes are gonna be pretty fun and hopefully I'll have time to start getting semiseriously into research now
Hah, second year analysis changes a lot with whoever's teaching tbh
I feel like there's now a semistable configuration and there was one a couple years before me, mine was a transition period which was why it was so bad lol
(I told you about the young woman who took the Spivak course at UGA during high school, loved math, went to UC and got chased out of mathematics within a quarter.)
I see. Yeah I feel like when Schlag was sorta calling the shots it was better. He actually made first quarter mostly multi and linear algebra. Soug kinda tried that and I think just doesn't like teaching those topics and slowly started changing toward more metric topology/functional analysis but hadn't fully committed to that
So when I took the class with him he could not make up his mind what he wanted to do
Originally I wasn't thinking of taking it actually. Was gonna do elliptic curves which is online but right before, but this is 15 minutes after so I was gonna have to go to the department way in advance just to watch a zoom lecture
And I wasn't too sure of the material either so I'm like eh
Yeah, also the lecturer is quite good which is a fun time. Officially no psets but he texs notes and within gives optional problems which I'll prob work on with a friend
Given that $(1+p)^{p^{n-1}}\equiv \pmod {p^n}$ and that $(1+p)^{p^{n-2}}\not\equiv \pmod{p^n}$, why is it true that 1+p has order $p^{n-1}$ in $U_{p^n}$? I think that 1+p could have order $p^r$, where $n-1>r>0$ divides $n-1$.
if $p^r$, where $r>0$ is such that $r<n-1$, is order of 1+p then $n-1=rq+r_1$ by Euclid's lemma. It follows that $(1+p)^{p^{n-1}}=(1+p)^{p^{rq+r_1}}=((1+p)^{p^{r+r+r+\cdots+r (\text{q times})}})^{p^{r_1}}$
learning it really depends on the proof and your background. i realize this is a useless answer.
there are some proofs that are just long and hard. sometimes it's reflective of the subject matter, sometimes it's reflective of who wrote the proof.
there are long and hard proofs that are not worth mastering.
the divide and conquer strategy is a high level thing. break the argument into pieces that you understand. you don't always have to start from the beginning. "if we could do __, then the end" is a step backward from the end that might be progress.
