consequently.org/news

I don’t think it is silly at all. In fact, that’s precisely what my plan is as well, see my post this morning.

Kai von Fintel , March 19, 2004 01:33 AM

A friend of mine (who’s published a lot of books, but doesn’t have a website) thinks there’s something to be said against publishing rough drafts of things online, if you’re also going to publish them later in a journal or as a book. He suspects that people won’t read the same thing twice, and that, if they’re only going to read it once, you want them to see the better version. What do you think?

Gillian Russell , March 19, 2004 02:41 AM

There’s something to Gill’s friend’s point, and that would be a reason to make sure that the first things you publish are very good indeed. I wouldn’t “publish,” in any sense, material which I didn’t take to be good enough to be published. I’d hope, then, that the better version is not so much better than the “final” version that it makes enough difference to harm or embarrass me.

Greg Restall , March 19, 2004 06:45 AM

Further to Gill’s friend’s point: I noticed Brian’s worry that people are pointing to the draft of his vagueness “book.” (I only put ‘book’ in shudder quotes because Brian does too.) Should he be worried? It’s hard to tell. If there’s a way for readers to be notified of any changes of mind that Brian has, and when the book is updated, then maybe it’s not a cause for concern. If we can take it that Brian’s book-readers also occasionally read his blog, maybe this is not a problem.

As a side-note, this was one reason behind the redesign of my writing pages, so each paper/book/thing I write has its own stable url, where all updates, comments, corrections, links to other discussions, etc, can be posted.

Greg Restall , March 19, 2004 09:18 AM

I should add that there are a couple of things that I really like about books on the web. (1) they’re searchable (no more time wasted thumbing though looking for a quote that I half remember and only half believe is in there) and (2) they don’t weigh anything (thanks to Oxford Scholarship Online I will never again have to cart a hardback “Beyond Rigidity” to Australia in the bottom of my backpack.)

Gillian Russell , March 19, 2004 03:02 PM

The only advantage of having a paper book is that it does not require electricity. And it is also nicer to look at. My eyes do not get tired when I read ink on paper. But, this is cool when you live in a place where there are libraries and bookshops that have what you need. For instance, if you are interested in Paraconsistent Logic it is more likely to find da Costa’s papers in a North-American University Library than in South America.

So, not only new stuff should be added, but crucial works from the 50’s, 60’s, the 70’s and the 80’s should be added. Right now I am having the trouble to find certain works by Quine, because they are not online. And texts by Quine himself have the extra advanatage that they are by far clearer than those who in more recent years wrote on his work trying to explain it.

Antonio Marmo , March 19, 2004 06:05 PM

Antonio’s point about accessibility is a good one. One reason we started the AJL was that logic journals are getting so expensive, and even most university libraries in Australia don’t carry them, let alone places where the international buying power of the currency is worse than the Australian dollar.

I think, though, that a physical book is nice for reasons other than its freedom from electricity, its portability and the ease of reading the typeface. It’s also much easier to flick through (but less easy to search, as Gill says), and it’s also easier to annotate. At least with the current state of technology. It’s also easier to read on the tram. My current means of reading electronic manuscripts on public transport is just about acceptable for reading plain text (at short bursts), but it’s terrible for reading PDF files.

Greg Restall , March 19, 2004 06:46 PM

I can’t help but notice striking parallels here with ongoing debates concerning online file sharing and music ‘piracy’. On the one hand the recording industry claims to be hurting due to this, and is engaged in significant litigation. On the other ARIA’s recently released figures for 2003 seem to belie this claim.

Now of course there are important disanalogies here but the parallel is that it seems - at least prima facie - that making music freely available increases album sales.

See my post on this for more …

M@ , March 20, 2004 02:54 AM

I agree with Matt’s point — online free distribution of stuff doesn’t necessarily decrease sales. However, the phenomenon is pretty complicated, and how we think about it is pretty complicated. After all, we introspect and think: if I could get this music for free, then I wouldn’t need to buy it. We don’t (and as far as I can tell publishers don’t either) think like this: if I had free access to this material, then I would become more of a reader (or a listener) of material like this, and this might influence my future buying decisions in lots of different ways…

What are these ways? How will it pan out? I have no settled ideas on this, but I do reckon that for writers and publishers, free distribution of at least some material is an experiment worth trying.

Greg Restall , March 20, 2004 03:05 PM

I would like to make a question. It is important to me, because right now I am very happy to be able to read the works by Logicians online. Sometimes I think that some Logicians do more real Linguistics than many people who call themselves Linguists. And I insist that Linguists should stop to worship this or that formal mind and admit that Linguistics is close to Logic, that they have to learn and use Logic in their work if they really want to make Linguistics.

Would you expect to sell at least 200,000 copies of your book in Australia or world wide if you published it? In Brazil if you write a novel in plain language and sell 10,000 copies you are a hit.

In Linguistics if you write a paper about some formal issue in plain generative style, you do not reach most generative linguists in one or two European Countries, who are much more interested in small empirical issues than in essential theoretic questions. There are many places where what is called an ‘interesting’ work is a mere list of examples.

The advantage of working with Logic is that everyone is aware that you always work with formal and theoretic questions, and that a highly abstract level of reasoning is the only desireable format. But how many people are into Logic? This is just a curiosity of mine.

Antonio Marmo , March 22, 2004 11:45 AM

If I get 10,000 sales of a logic book, worldwide, I’d be very happy! A typical first run is around 1000 to 2000 for a graduate level textbook or monograph of a logic book. You’d sell lots more for something which will be assigned as an intro-level text, of course.

How many people are into logic? Not enough, obviously!

Greg Restall , March 22, 2004 01:01 PM

Greg,

Thanks for your reply. I always suspected that.

Linguistics is also a very solitary activity at least for formal linguists.

I guess it was João Marcos or Coniglio who wrote a paper mentioning that in the past a good education included Logic among the basic subjects that every gentleman had to learn.

I have a book from the 60’s, whose authors (Corne & Robineau) tried to convince French Math teachers to make Math more accessible and palatable to younger students by teaching them Classic Logic, correlating it to set theory and applying it to the reading of newspapers. They even proposed kinds of games that consisted of solving (jigsaw) puzzles with logic. I do not know how things are in France now, if this sort of idea has been tried or had some effect within the frame of the French educational system. But I have detected one common ‘etiologic’ factor in many places:

The problem starts in the early school, before College. Students are motivated NOT to like any kind of formal reasoning, whose main representative is Mathematics. But even when they learn syntax (traditional grammar), they also learn to hate it. So, when students come to College, many among them are already predisposed to find formal approaches (together with all theories) abhorring. Thereafter, if they go to some Graduate programme, they will carry like 15 years of anti-formalism ‘indoctrination’.

When you say ‘I want people to read my book’ you are also fighting the powerful perversity of some School systems, you are standing against some dogmas.

Antonio_Marmo , March 23, 2004 04:17 AM

I suspect some of the effects you describe (higher sales despite of give-aways) are part of the way information economy works. Partially it’s the “network effect” in which products gain in value depending on the number of customers (the classic example is fax machines). The other is “self-selecting” customer pricing, in which customers who can afford more will pay more because of minor product enhancements (e.g. nice cover). For interesting discussions on information economy see Hal Varian’s site at Berkeley (www.sims.berkeley.edu/resources/infoecon).

RdR , April 15, 2004 12:20 PM

BTW, a quick check shows that your target of taking over the google rating for philosophical logic might be very achievable. A search for “philosophical logic” shows no online text anywhere in the topic rankings. A search for “Introduction logic” has an online text in the top, but its not philosophically oriented.

RdR , April 15, 2004 04:12 PM

Thanks, Richard! The pointer to Hal Varian’s stuff is really worthwhile. And the Google searches give me a target to reach.

Once the book’s written, of course!

Greg Restall , April 16, 2004 12:10 AM

I m a student of business administration.logic is also my subject.i hope u will help me to understand logic and logical problems.in the end thankyou for this help. Ur Sincere Syed Naseem Haider Rizvi

Syed Naseem Haider , March 12, 2005 05:25 AM

I think that it totally depends on the audience you try to reach.

I don’t want to sound disrespectful, arrogent or pedantic but I think that the less mental or emotional effort that is needed to access (study) the material the less the audience will be prepared to pay. If it’s too easy, then it’s worthless. The audience needs to feel that the material will make them beter, will improve them.

Maybe this is the reason why Hollywood is scared: They don’t believe in an intelligent audience. An intelligent audience is a much harder audience, less forgiving and much more diverse.

So my conclusion would have to be that this methode of publishing should be perfect especially for top academic works.

Gideon , May 14, 2005 06:56 AM