&quot;Would you consider spending a lot of time and effort on a book (.pdf) in your research area - for no material reward&quot;
Well, would you consider putting your blood, sweat, tears into a project for a couple of years, for maybe $4,000? Because that is the &#x27;payoff&#x27; for this sort of thing. In other words, no writer is doing it for the money.<p>I did it because I want people to know things, and I remember when I didn&#x27;t have a SV salary (my father worked road maintenance, my mother cleaned toilets at hotels) and was utterly unable to access information I desperately wanted. Today I get emails from grad students and people from countries with economies that make it impossible for them to drop $150 US on a book. Why, oh why would I work this hard and then pretty much guarantee that no one but a SV engineer or tenured professor could access it? To me, that is a crazy proposition. Even if the book sales were $50K it wouldn&#x27;t pay back the time invested.<p>Print (this kind) is dying. We can use IPython Notebook (now Jupyter notebook), or LaTeX to make perfect copy. We can be open in all ways - share the source that made the charts, share the data, and of course, share the text. You can make corrections, or run different experiments. You can fix bugs in the code. You can change the language (text or computer).<p>Others have mentioned academic prestige. I guess that exists, still, for now. But plenty of academics are starting to use open source, and I both hope and think that this will gain momentum. It&#x27;s perverse for an academic institution to punish making information widely available. I&#x27;ll admit I have no insight as to how to change that. I hope things like open access being mandated by receiving public funds will help get us there.<p>Anyway, so far as I know, no one writes a 300 copy book for material reward. Or, they do that once, and then the economics of the situation comes home to them.