Hello everyone,

As you may remember, I edited a book, Histories of Computing, collecting the late Mike Mahoney’s papers on the history of computing. I don’t get sales statements or royalties – those go to his estate, but it looks from Worldcat as though library sales for the $50 hardcover have been respectable but not outstanding – about 430 libraries showing up. (If you want to persuade your librarian to purchase it, you could show them Nathan Ensmenger’s very positive review in Science -- http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6048/1383.1.full).

Now $50 is obviously a lot to pay for a collection of previously published essays, however brilliant the critical introduction and editing. So it would be nice is Harvard UP could be persuaded to issue a paperback for around $25, at which point it would become more of an impulse buy.

The economics of that would depend on a reasonable prospect of adoption for courses. I don’t have much personal insight into this – the only time I’ve attempted teaching history in the last ten years is when I was invited to run a doctoral seminar at in the information and communication school of the University of Western Ontario this summer. It attracted one student, who dropped out half way through. So I don’t want to promise Harvard that there is a huge market for the collection if that’s not true.

So, would you be likely to assign a $25 softcover of Histories of Computing for a class? If so, approximately how many students and how often might you teach it. Send me an email, and if I get a reasonable number of expressions of interest I’ll forward them to HUP.

Tom