books [closed]

Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0

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May 12, 2012 at 3:36	history	closed	Gjergji Zaimi Steven Landsburg José Figueroa-O'Farrill user9072 Andy Putman		not a real question
May 12, 2012 at 0:08	comment	added	user9072		@evf: The debate you alude to even 'created' the following forum publishing.mathforge.org , which in fact seems like a much better place for this question/discussion than MO.
May 11, 2012 at 21:34	comment	added	evf		Interesting, I've never really thought about this "vanity argument" before, though I know that many programmers are reluctant to publish source code for the very same reason. Personally, I don't really care what it looks like, I just let whoever downloads it judge whether or not they find it useful.
May 11, 2012 at 20:31	comment	added	Charles Staats		This probably is not a good reason (nor am I an experienced enough teacher to have a well-formed opinion), but part of the thrill of using LaTeX is producing something "beautiful" that I want others to see. The source code itself is usually rather ugly, and I am not all that enamored of the idea of other people looking at it. If I were to release the source code, I would feel pressure to "beautify" it as much as possible (make the line breaks nicer, insert commented-out blank lines in appropriate places, organize the preamble,...) and I do not consider this a good use of my time.
May 11, 2012 at 20:02	answer	added	timur		timeline score: 1
May 11, 2012 at 19:00	answer	added	Neil Strickland		timeline score: 4
May 11, 2012 at 18:12	comment	added	evf		There's the large debate about open access journals and how much it costs the research community. On the other hand textbooks are also very expensive and controlled by often the same publishing companies. I've often wanted to write my own notes for a class, but not had the time. If I had someone else's notes to use as a basis, I would probably go with this option more often. I'm curious how many hours of work have been wasted reinventing the wheel by writing yet another set of linear algebra notes starting from scratch?
May 11, 2012 at 16:35	answer	added	Nicola Ciccoli		timeline score: 8
May 11, 2012 at 16:24	comment	added	evf		This is really the only forum I know where I could ask this, but I apologize if this doesn't belong here. There's another point I could also add to the list: if the students see the LaTeX code it might encourage some of them to learn LaTeX.
May 11, 2012 at 15:32	comment	added	Tom Leinster		Not sure this question belongs here, but I'll add a comment: some people upload their course notes to the arXiv (probably more often for more advanced courses). The Latex source is then by default publicly available.
May 11, 2012 at 15:00	history	edited	evf	CC BY-SA 3.0	added 2 characters in body; Post Made Community Wiki
May 11, 2012 at 14:52	history	asked	evf	CC BY-SA 3.0