[SIGCIS-Members] new book on history of computing at NSF

[Armando Fox]

yes, academic publishing, indeed.

as an alternative, in case anyone wants to avail themselves of this resource....several years ago a colleague and i wrote a textbook <http://saasbook.info/> and after much deliberation decided to self-publish rather than work with an academic or professional-press publisher.  result: we own the content; print book is under $30 (~500 pp); kindle edition is $9.99.  lots of copies sold and good response.  and because we own it, we're free to gift PDFs or whatever to students who truly can't afford it, to make our own arrangements for translations, to allow repackaging the book in other ways, etc.

we wrote about <https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxsb25nbGFzdGluZ3NvZnR3YXJlfGd4OjdjYmU3ZTI2MTc4NjI0NGU> our experience doing this (pros and cons) for other academic colleagues, and open-sourced the toolchain <http://github.com/armandofox/latex2ebook> that does most of the work of converting a single set of LaTeX files into both a handsome PDF suitable for printing-on-demand and a Kindle edition.   tl;dr if you are reasonably skilled with LaTeX then you can do what we did.

fight the power!


Armando Fox (pronouns: he, him; él)
Professor, Computer Science Division
Faculty Advisor, Digital Learning Strategy & MOOCLab
UC Berkeley Campus Equity Advisor
581 Soda Hall MC#1776, Berkeley, CA 94720-1776
+1.510.642.6820 / http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fox <http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fox>

Learn to build software free at saas-class.org

> On Dec 9, 2019, at 21:38, Ian S. King <isking at uw.edu> wrote:
> 
> Evan, welcome to academic publishing.  :-( 
> 
> On Mon, Dec 9, 2019 at 7:46 PM Evan Koblentz <evan at vcfed.org <mailto:evan at vcfed.org>> wrote:
> On 12/9/19 7:20 PM, William Aspray wrote:
>> You may be interested in the recent publication of Peter A. Freeman, W. Richards Adrion, and William Aspray, Computing and the National Science Foundation, 1950-2016: Building a Foundation for Modern Computing (ACM Books, 2019, 407 pp.).
>> 
>> Thanks to Janet Abbate, Tom Haigh, and Jeff Yost for serving on the historical advisory committee for the project; and Tom Misa for shepherding the book through the publication process. NSF supported the project with a grant but did not have any editorial control over the content.
>> 
>> The project resulted in approximately 5,000 documents and 50 oral histories being deposited at the Babbage Institute. These materials will eventually be available for scholarly use once the collection has been processed.
>> 
>> -Bill Aspray
> 
> Sounds great, but the price is outrageous:
> 
> https://www.amazon.com/Computing-National-Science-Foundation-1950-2016/dp/1450372775 <https://www.amazon.com/Computing-National-Science-Foundation-1950-2016/dp/1450372775>_______________________________________________
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> 
> -- 
> Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate
> The Information School <http://ischool.uw.edu/>
> Dissertation: "Why the Conversation Mattered: Constructing a Sociotechnical Narrative Through a Design Lens
> 
> Principal Investigator, "Reflections on Early Computing and Social Change", UW IRB #42619
> 
> Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal <http://tribunalvoices.org/> 
> Value Sensitive Design Research Lab <http://vsdesign.org/>
> 
> University of Washington
> 
> There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China." 
> _______________________________________________
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