Slashdot Mirror
Professor Creates His Own Cisco Manual
yootje writes "ZDnet is running a story about a professor who made his own Cisco networking textbook, with 800 pages: "Computing instructor Matt Basham's suggestions for improving Cisco Systems' official training manuals fell on deaf ears for years. But he appears to have the networking giant's attention now." The professor made his book available for free on his website."
It's great to hear a story about someone who took it upon himself to do what was needed. Cisco was obviously not responsive to him, so he goes out and does it on his own. Not only that, he decides to share his work with everyone. Now hopefully Cisco has the common sense not to sue him for his efforts.
DeviantArt Page
NSFWIt's a 5.1MB Microsoft Word file.
Oh the horror... The horror...
Please, Mr Matt Basham, release this as a PDF, RTF or HTML file... Anything but Word. I ma willing to help if needed.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I'm still wondering why the governments don't require free and "open source" text for public schools. In college, the professors used to change the text every semester so that the students couldn't sell the books back at the end of the semester (likely getting kick-backs from the text manufacturers, no doubt).
If just one state would sit down and even purchase some good works and make them freely available for modification and distribution, then the cost of education would be greatly reduced. Profs would be free to make changes at it fits their style so long as those changes are re-posted to the public. Students could read the texts online and/or print them.
What am I not seeing here?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
It's quite strange that it is not a PDF file.
but is anyone wants the 5 meg html version it here
How much of the curriculum is specific to Cisco? And if it is specific to Cisco, then isn't that sort of limiting? I'm sure you'll get a thorough grounding in TCP/IP as well, but hell, you can get that from Richard Stevens TCP/IP Illustrated Vol 1.
I've known several people who have been convinced that getting these Cisco certs will lead to untold riches - they have all been disappointed. It's definitely no substitute for a 4 year degree.
Seemed to open fine (After a while!) in OpenOffice Writer 1.1.2. Haven't opened in actual Word to compare formatting, but looks reasonable to me. No complaints here.
-m
http://www.invisik.com
Cisco has so much of the networking infrastructure market they obviously didn't care about the quality of their documentation. Luckily, there has always been a market for outsiders who can figure things out and explain them to others. Cisco would be smart to work with this guy.
They probably figured, "we can charge a ton for our cert's forever, because no one is going to take the time to write a book." OOPS! I hope other people follow suit and finally we will be rid of the "if you're not certified, you can't have learned it" business principle.
stuff |
good to see somebody doing this. I took the first semester Cisco course at my college, and yeah, the books weren't all that good. I haven't seen his work yet, but I do recall the first semester is exclusively going over the seven layers of the OSI model in sometimes painful detail. Can tend to throw the beginning student off, especially considering the OSI model is not much more than an academic tool anyway, TCP/IP is were its at in the 'real world'.
I've seen some of the initial comments here and if you notice that the price of the book is $25 for the printed version, of which Mr. Basham get's $5 (20%) and the publisher gets the rest. Honestly I don't have the time to figure out what LuLu.com's expenses might be (since I have no idea the cost of bandwidth to download 5MB), but this seems like a VERY valid business model for homegrown authors to go to. Good luck to LuLu.com and my they break open the gates of good reading at reasonable costs!!!
"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." -- Albert Einstein
I think that this is a very useful contribution to anyone who is looking for information on Cisco networking. It's definately a "middle finger" to big companies who are so set in their ways, they are unwilling to take advice from people in the field who have the qualifications and experience to make a genuine contribution to their documentation.
In many ways, it also reflects the spirit of the Free Software movement, in many respects. It reflects the frustration of a constant refusal to fix issues with something released in what is, in certain respects, a proprietary format, and the result of writing a version, which is then distributed for free. It's good to see :)
Speaking of which, I wonder if Mr Basham could be convinced to release the text under a free license, like the GNU FDL... possibly not, if he has already made arrangements with publishers, but it might be worth looking into...
Networks need manuals? I thought you just had to make sure no-one knocked the patch cables out.
http://jfin.org/jFin pure java open source financial library
Self-published textbooks will only work when some sort of feedback mechanism is in place to offer an indication of the quality of the book.
For years, at the University of South Florida in Tampa, the engineering college subjected undergraduates to an extremely poor thermodynamics text self-published by an influential department chair until the thermo scores started to slide on the state EIT exams.
Cisco Press books are, without a duobt, the best technical manuals (from a manufacturer) that I have yet read. Anyone who simply bashes on the 'networking academy' crap is doing a serious disservice to the legions of people who have progressed far beyond that simple standard of networking knowledge.
I imagine that a large number of people who have never read Jeff Doyle's "Routing TCP/IP" Vols. I & II, or Kennedy Clark's "Cisco LAN Switching" will comment about this article - read any dense technical manual by either of the above, or Bassam Halabi, or Priscilla Oppenheimer, or any non-entry level book, and see what I mean.
Besides, all of the entry-level Cisco knowledge focuses on the OSI model and BASIC network troubleshooting. If you REALLY wanted to learn that and not be led by the hand thru a technical school, you would read "TCP/IP Illustrated" by W. Richard Stevens.
Considering that the manual discloses methods of operating and controlling Cisco products, as well as the interfaces used by them, could Cisco sue under the DMCA for copyright theft of its instructions on how to use its equipment.
If the instructions were generated by a computer algorithim then the answer to this is a resounding yes as then Cisco would have patented 'a method by which Cisco,(us), uses a PC to and printer to generate the instructions to operate our hardware', and could then sue the good doctor as presumably he used a PC and printer too.
May the Maths Be with you!
Well, it's for CCNA which is an ok beginning. Downloading now to see if it'll help with my CCNP recert.
:-)
I got my CCNA simply to understand networking better and the environment at work. The company paid for a CCNP class so I felt I had to give it a shot and got my CCNP 5 months after the class ended. Now that I have to recert, I'm studying the Switch/Router books and, even though I didn't work as a network engineer, much of the material is familiar.
Do you know what they call someone who received the lowest passing scores on the tests? "Cisco Certified"
Shit better not happen!
How can they argue that they do not overprice their books [in the US] when you can pick the same book up in Europe, for much less. And what is really funny... it even says on them "Not for sale in the US" [because there we have this really good thing going on with the other publishers about not going below $0.2 per page EVER].
Offer him your help and write it in LaTex.
Don't answer me. Moderate. Slashdot is about moderation, not discussion.
Offering a 5mb file on slashdot...
That takes balls.
Just wait till some crappy band steals your nic.
After clicking on a link below, click on "View as HTML" on the resulting page.
Preface:p college.edu%2Fstar%2Fcisco%2FMatt%2Fpreface.doc
http://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.s
Textbook:p college.edu%2Fstar%2Fcisco%2FMatt%2Ftextbook.doc *
http://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.s
It's a gigantic HTML file and may give your browser fits, but at least it's not a MS Word doc file.
[* looks like Google hasn't parsed that big doc into HTML yet, maybe they will soon now :) ]
One simple rule for its versus it's
See my other post, and mod it up. I don't need the karma points, just trying to help out.
One simple rule for its versus it's
could someone please post the Word file here as well
/., but I put it up on Shareaza's G2. Search for CCNA-manual.doc.
It's over 500 pages, so not really postable to
Whoa! I think you and another poster a little further down are confusing two completely different issues. The licence under which a textbook is released has nothing to do with which version of the textbook is set as a standard.
If a textbook is released under a licence which allows it to be freely modified and redistributed, this means exactly that - it can legally be freely modified and redistributed. Any modified versions, however, will not be the textbook which was prescribed for the course.
Just because Linux is open source doesn't mean that an institution can't require all its employees to use a standardised version of it.
It's likely that respectable "upgrades" of the textbook would periodically be adopted as the new standard, but this would not happen automatically (in theory, there is no reason for it to happen automatically now, but - as other people have said - it is worth a lot of money to many people to ensure that it does).
If the author didn't make supermegabucks off every pointless, trivial change, there would be no incentive for him to make pointless, trivial changes. And there would be no incentive for other people involved to push institutions into adopting the updated version when it isn't necessary.
If I recall correctly, not too long ago some folks had the bright idea of ordering their books from Canada/UK. Seems that the same exact textbooks there cost up to 50% less than in the states.
Yeah, right.
Does the license for using / touching / seeing / feeling a Cisco router contain language that prevents dissemination of this type of info? Doesn't Oracle have a license that says you can't release benchmark information?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
There'll be 300 virus infested copies in half an hour. Post a magnet link, next time.
Just google mentifex kook for further details.
For those of you who really want this in a PDF format, I have converted it.
This is the download page, all you have to do is sign up for a free account (I only do this to prevent hot linking of files.)
I'm a designer, with some technical inclination, and frankly unless I'm engineering mission critical software, most of the concepts are not that difficult. Do this to open port xxx! So, when I needed to look at my IP Sec to understand how it needed to be programed without paying uunet to do it, I looked around for materials. There wasn't much as far as tutorials go, and uunet did do it for free anyway, but it was mostly just lines of "open port xxx." Oooh, punching holes in a firewall. But that saved me a grand, and as a small business person, this matters.
I converted the MS Word to a PDF and it is available on my school's server. They are going to hate me:
http://www.lehigh.edu/~mlt3/textbook.pdf
The good professor is really trying to study just how many people will blindly open a word doc from an untrusted source. What do you want to bet that opening the document in word triggers a counter somewhere?
I've been doing this same thing for years now....guess I just never thought to put it up on /. :-)
;-).
Several years ago, when I was studying for my certs, I decided to compile all my material into a book.
It has since grown into two separate books, one for the CCNA and one for the CCIE.
While they used to be free, I decided to begin charging a small fee (10 bux), but only enough to cover the costs of my website -- incidentally, I've never really been able to recoup that.
If anyone is interested, the books, along with loads of free material are available (both online and downloadable) at gdd.net.
Please note that I do like for folks to register, but it is free and rather painless
This is the future.. it would be nice for fields like electrical engineering, where the core material was discovered and published several hundred years ago - but you still have to pay $200 every year or so for the texts. A standard reference text that could be improved, peer reviewed, and built upon year after year would be a tremendous boon to mankind. I think of all the useless projects and questions I worked out over the years, imagine if that work went towards improving a collective body of information. Perhaps, something like another collaborative effort we know.
:-)
Yes, this won't work for everything. But things like calculus, fourier transforms, electromagnetics, classical signal processing, statics, dynamics, statistics - this is cookie cutter stuff. Should apply right through the grade schools, too. I suppose I should be thankful those things are even allowed to be taught anymore, because you can do naughty things with them.
I won't tell you how mad it made me lugging close to 100lbs of books around for 5 years when if things were sane, they could be accessed either online, or via pdf files.
If anyone wants to be a patron saint - opening those materials up would potentially help a lot of people. Books are very expensive. Moreso outside of the western world.
..don't panic
Surely if you wanted to typeset / author a book these days, Word wouldn't be your first choice of editor. Especially in acadameia. Docbook, LaTeX, even the ROFF family would seem more portable in terms of generating useful output. Oh well.
Once upon a time, Word really stuggled with documents over 256 pages. I'm sure that's fixed, but what about revision control, and single point of truth? Surely it has to be a pain to incorporate all your examples in the Word document as copies of what you were really using.
Does someone have a good place to chuck it in PDF form? I'd be quite happy to render it from Word to PDF. (At least that's slightly less evil).
...roamed the earth and I was still a university student 6-10 of us used to get to gether, buy one copy of each book and take them down to the local copy shop who's owner lived off such business and hence asked did not piss and moan about copyrights. The resultant stacks of A4 sheets were then fitted in a spiral bindings. It was clunky but lasted surprisingly well and with 10-12 books at $40-100 each you usually had enough saved up over every second semester or so to upgrade your PC to handle the latest video games, drawing software math suite etc. or to buy some other small luxury like a rusty old VW Golf.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Sorry, I should have indicated that I was joking.
Downloaded the thing and read a few pages... he starts almost imediately with a nono regarding websites. Screenshots of websites where to find information complete with arrows to parts of that image... nice.. What if Cisco revamps their website?
459 pages is the page count of this book... at least.. that's what MS Word 2k is telling me.
Post a magnet link, next time.
Fair point. Though I never trust anything I download, and my sharing is done through a separate system. I can't use the magnet links myself, but I think this works:
CCNA-manual.doc
This time, logged in and ready to provide clickable links to both PDF and DOC versions of the book:
Preface
DOC version
PDF version
This reminds me of the article: "If nobody reads the manual, why are bookshops overflowing with computing books?"
The next time someone knocks the quality of Open Source documentation written by volunteers, consider the quality of the work by our professional colleagues. Grass-roots efforts like this don't prove there is a pent-up demand for technical documentation that starts from first principles.
In the meantime, someone needs to teach the good professor DocBook...
Have you heard of WikiBooks? It's an open content textbook creation site, similar to wikipedia, and is precisely intended for what you describe. It's still pretty early in terms of content development, but there's a few nice textbooks there already.
> Grass-roots efforts like this don't prove there is a pent-up demand for technical documentation that starts from first principles.
Oops... That should have read: "Grass-roots efforts like this do prove there is a pent-up demand for technical documentation that starts from first principles."
When the "Submit" and "Preview" buttons are next to each other, accidents like this sometimes happen.
here is another mirror, on what is probably a much much faster pipe. :)
(could only squeeze 48K/sec off your school..)
To some extent I can speak for Bob Young on this subject--the pricing situation with textbooks was very much the impetus for him to start Lulu.com. We are all in agreement on the problem.
Two points worth noting, however: when we (Lulu.com) talk to professors about textbook publishing, they broadly express the same concerns that you and others do about the books having become too expensive. Our experience is that professors are so interested in making cheaper books available to students that they are more likely to want to give away their IP than to sell it. From a Lulu perspective, we support their right to give it away, but if we are going to survive as a business we also hope that some authors of valuable content will charge something for their work.The other thing I would point out is that it's actually the college bookstores that prevent the textbook publishers from offering downloads of textbooks. Believe it or not, they're acting the villain in this saga to some extent by pressuring the publishers not to disintermediate sales (I think that's the right word--but you get the idea).
http://MarketingType.com
Superiority of open culture over corporate culture has been examplified.
Superiority of law enforcement over sane intellect will be examplified later.
There you are, staring at me again.
I volunteer to print the manual out, scan it into TIFF images, tie them together, and publish it all as one big image. A mere 1Tb! Get yours now!
"If you could only see what I've seen with your eyes..." - Roy Batty
-
Lesson 1: Finding CISCO's web site.
-
Lesson 2: Opening a "MS-DOS" window on Windows 95/98. (Not an NT-family OS, even though this is a corporate networking class.)
-
Lesson 3: Installing a network card. ("Try to see how a Token Ring NIC differs from an Ethernet NIC.")
-
A little further along, there are chapters on binary arithmetic, hex arithmetic, IP addressing, and the symbols Cisco uses in their manuals.
Then, immediately after the chapter on IP addressing, things suddenly get complicated:
-
You are the network administrator for an upstart website publishing company. They have
offices in two adjacent buildings on different floors. Lately, they have realized the costs
of their individual Internet accounts far exceeds the costs of installing and maintaining a
T-1 line. As the network guru you are to design a network that will utilize FDDI between
the buildings. The west building uses floors 3, 4, and 5 for the sales and admin staff.
Here you will want to use a CISCO Catalyst 5000 with a FDDI module, a management
module, and a 24-port switch module. From there each floor will distribute access via a
CISCO 1924 switch to each of its 20 nodes (workstations, servers, and printers). The east
building uses floors 1 through 5 for the design and engineering staff. Here you will want
to use a CISCO Catalyst 5500 with a FDDI module, a management module, and a 24-port
switch module. You will also have a CISCO 2610 router with T-1 module, and a
Kentrox CSU/DSU for your full T-1 line. Your ISP, ComBase has sold you two blocks
of 62 IP addresses: 198.74.56.x (1-62) and (65-126). Combase will also provide the DNS
services, unlike most ISP's where more than 24 IP's are ordered. Design your network,
including cabling and grounds, to include all IP's, subnet masks, gateways, and anything
else you need to include.
Some quotes:This is before they've mentioned how to configure, operate or use any of that stuff. Wierd.
"Supercomputer--See Nasa, Berkely, MIT, etc. Kind of like the W.O.P.R. in Wargames."
The Word format
The PDF format
Leech away.
hes dumbed down the manual to make room for the computer illiterate..
a sepperate class
If only "computer illiteracy" were the only kind we had to worry about...
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
Seriously. People who modded that shit up: what the fuck?
I'm appalled. Not because it's a Microsoft product, but because Word does such a shoddy job of handling large files. It should have been written in LaTeX, then published as a post script or pdf. For those not familiar, Word chokes on that 5MB file. You can write entire books in LaTeX (or magazines since those technically contain more data).
Question everything
I read somewhere (but couldnt find the reference today) that some people are scanning in textbook pages for file sharing. At an average of $108 per (legal) textbook and approaching $0.50 per (legal) page, this stimulates the file sharing market. Used to be you could find reprinted textbooks (on crappy paper) in Asian cities for dimes on the dollar. Now they may be available on CD-ROMS at pennies on the dollar.
Due to the unreliability of scan-to-text conversion, this technology had to wait until the scanned page-image bandwidths were economical, i.e. shared video files paved the way. You also get the formating and figures in the page-images.
I seem to have done this a few times - although I'm surprised something as mature as Cicso routers would require it.
One of the first '3rd party' manuals I wrote was for the error handling features in Visual Workbench 3.0 for the Mac. The documentation that came with it wasn't (documentation).
Imagine for a moment a world without hypothetical situations...
Of course, that was a huge time sink, and it still did cost me about 20% of the books' price when all was said and done (quality data binders cost good money, after all). But man, after years of getting bent over the barrel by the local book cartel, it sure felt good.
Method of processing duck feet
No, no conflict of interest at all. Somehow I doubt the basic accounting principles change all that frequently. The guy was such an asshat. He routinely derided students who dared to express confusion about his lecture to his 500+ seat lecture hall.
Method of processing duck feet
In short, it's the publishers that keeps prices high and pushes new versions all the time. When is the last time the Latin language changed?
He must not be from around here.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
The price difference that a bookstore takes is also greater than you suggest. We deal with many, many bookstores --college and otherwise--every day. The typical bookstore requests a significant discount on books when ordering from a supplier like us. When there is a third intermediary (distributor), the distributor and the bookstore generally have to try to split a 50-55% discount among themselves. The other 45-50% of the 'jacket' price of the book has to be split between the manufacturer, the publisher, and the author.
To use one specific example, in the case of the most popular college textbook published through Lulu.com, the college bookstores buy the book directly from Lulu at a 38% discount from the cover price. Because Lulu.com doesn't accept returns (the limitation of print on demand technology), the bookstore also assumes the risk for any books that go unsold. The bookstore buys the books at $12.89 per book and sells them to students at $17.75 for a new copy. They also sell used copies.
Again, please don't misunderstand. I'm not questioning the right of bookstores to make money--they make little enough of it as it is--just elucidating the elements of the costs so as to make for a more informed discussion.
http://MarketingType.com
First, kudos to the prof for doing what he thought best for his students.
Second, for those sneering at Word, I have done commercial work in Word in single files from a few bytes to over 100MB. I did it that way because my clients asked for it in that format, No other format was of interest to them nor were suggestions for alternate methods such as simple HTML considered. Their personnel could handle hyperlinks just fine in Word, thank you.
It's what your audience and clients want that counts. I did over 50 manuals for one client, all stable all successful.
Open office is a good set of apps. HTML is a good presentation method. The same applies to the application methods and applications available in Microsoft Office.
I'm retired now and moving over to Linux for fun. I don't have to satisfy any clients so fooling around in Linux is fine. Maybe someday OO will be on a par with MO. But, right now as close as OO is, it isn't quite there.
If you work with business documentation, you better know MO.
Flame away!
with Cisco Inc. Just finished Cisco Training and the class used the two Cisco Press books, (Intro and ICND) for training. The instructor made it clear that the Cisco Press books have no affiliation with Cisco Inc.
Have you seen this breakdown of the textbook dollar? http://www.nacs.org/common/research/textbook$.pdf
No one imho is a villain in this scene.... Publishers, bookstores are not like Enron. It's capitalism. It's inflation. Yes there should be alternatives to getting information for free to further the original intent of the Gutenberg press! But, this raises more questions than answers them for me.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, so what cost does this "self-publishing" have? What kind of accuracy and quality can lulu.com ensure? What does it actually cost the student/reader if this material is not accurate and they go to get certified and have been possibly mislead by one man's material? What does it cost the student (or their school lab resources) to print out this "free" book of 500 to 800 pages to gain the full benefit of a textbook ? (i.e. having the ability to read offline, highlight, etc. is still a tangible benefit of printed books) What real costs do ambitious people like Mr. Basham incur to get their material published--read the fine print on lulu.com services and/or just track what it takes in personal time & $$ to write, edit, review, format, proofread, and dissemninate this material)? What more does a commercial publisher provide than lulu.com? Is lulu.com truly a better alternative or just an alternative?
Mr. Basham's book is meant to work with a curriculum that is already free and online through the Academy program. All instructors in this program are encouraged to provide each other with free material to share. Cisco has a website set up for this.
Does anyone question the costs mentioned in the articles for the school tuition & fees (Ranging from $2k to $7k) for the same program?
The Cisco texts he is "competing" with have an associated retail price, yes, but certainly not as much as a lot of textbooks are these days ("only" $67 for a companion guide, $22 for a lab manual, $30 for a workbook), and it must be noted they can be had for a discounted price off the publisher's site. (See ciscopress.com, register and get 25% off all ciscopress books). Is this disintermediating? or is it just another alternative?
Isn't it a bit unprofessional to have adware (possibly spyware) with Rogaine advertisements in the top bar of internet explorer while documenting Cisco webpage browsing? Check out the screenshots of the webpages in his Cisco textbook "Learning by doing" and you'll know what I'm talking about...
Layer 5: The Session Layer... This is the layer that says "HEY!" I want to establish a networking session. In fact, if you have internet access from your home computer then you may even see the message "establishing session" during the connection process.
That's just wrong. The OSI model is different from what actually happens in the TCP/IP protocol stack. The Presentation and Session layers aren't actually present in the real TCP/IP world, so claiming that something happens there is incorrect. That "establishing session" message is taking place either at the Application or Transport levels, but not at the non-existant Session layer.
In addition, his informal prose ("old school", "friggin", etc...) gave the book a definite unprofessional feel; some people may think the book is more accessible this way, but I felt that it was a bit sloppy.
Heya guys,
I work for Red Hat teaching their stuff now, but before that I wrote and taught my own training course.
All of the training materials, including the full courseware, is available free from here (burn the contents of the whole lna4 dir to a CD).
I own copyright for it, you're licensed to use it under the FDL.
Mike MacCana
would've been written with LaTeX
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'll take a stab at a few of these questions.
>>There is no such thing as a free lunch, so what cost does this "self-publishing" have?
If we are talking about Lulu.com in particular, there are no specific costs involved on the publishing side, apart from the effort required to put together a publishable book (which is considerable). That said, an author would be well-advised to pay for editing, proofreading, typesetting, and cover art prior to publishing the book. But many authors manage to do all of this themselves, and to do a decent job (Basham, for example). If an author wants expanded distribution, he/she should also purchase ISBN assigment for $150, which will get the book listed on retail sites such as Amazon.com. Lulu.com's 20% commission comes from sales of the book, not from charging the author/publisher.
>>What kind of accuracy and quality can lulu.com ensure?
None.
>>What does it actually cost the student/reader if this material is not accurate and they go to get certified and have been possibly mislead by one man's material?
The marketplace is a pretty good judge when it comes to this kind of thing. A bad CISCO certification book is not likely to sell very well. In Basham's case, he actually gives away the electronic version for free, so it's pretty easy to evaluate. But there is always risk when you buy something. I'm told aphrodisiacs sell pretty well on the web, too.
>>What does it cost the student (or their school lab resources) to print out this "free" book of 500 to 800 pages to gain the full benefit of a textbook ? (i.e. having the ability to read offline, highlight, etc. is still a tangible benefit of printed books)
Of course, one of the nifty things about Lulu.com is that you can buy an actual printed book (bound and all), so you don't have to print it out yourself. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that any students who are printing out 800 page PDFs are probably doing so either at school or at work. So perhaps a better question would be, how much is it costing employers and institutions? The cost of a bound 800-page book through Lulu.com is likely to be upwards of $20, depending on what royalty the author has set on the book.
>>What real costs do ambitious people like Mr. Basham incur to get their material published--read the fine print on lulu.com services and/or just track what it takes in personal time & $$ to write, edit, review, format, proofread, and dissemninate this material)?
A better question for Matt Basham. I'm sure he spent an enormous amount of time putting together the book. He is paid by the school at which he teaches, however, and all the publicity he has garnered will be good for the school program.
>>What more does a commercial publisher provide than lulu.com?
Good question. Conventional publishers provide, in addition to a sophisticated distribution mechanism, marketing. And marketing is key. Publishing through Lulu.com means that an author/publisher must do his own marketing. But having pointed that out, I have yet to find a conventionally published author who was happy with the marketing his publishing company provided for his book. Marketing is expensive and frequently unsuccessful. Lulu.com as a publishing tool (and, in a larger sense, the web itself as a distribution tool) provides a means by which the marketplace can access a work and determine its worth on its own, in a democratic fashion, as opposed to being told what is valuable by marketers with deep pockets. Because publishing through Lulu.com doesn't require the big investment (risk) required by conventional publishing, then there is less pressure to succeed, which allows more books with smaller potential readerships to reach the marketplace. That's good for both authors and readers.
>>Is l
http://MarketingType.com