On Books: Buy More!
| Fernando Q. Gouvêa |
This article is published in the December 2011/January 2012 issue of MAA FOCUS.
In tough economic times, we all look for ways to spend less. Cutting back on book purchases is always high on the list of possibilities. Books, after all, are rarely essential. A famous science fiction writer used to say that authors are always competing for their audiences’ beer money, and there’s a lot of truth to that.
I’m here to argue, however, that you should buy more books. Despite the economic gloom, despite libraries, the Internet, the arXiv, and Google books, buy more.
Publishing mathematics books has never been a high-profit enterprise, very fortunate authors of elementary textbooks excepted. Although we often complain about the price of textbooks, the truth is that we couldn’t teach our courses in quite the same way without them. Moreover, “our” books are usually published by our people: professional societies (such as MAA, AMS, and many others), university presses (particularly Princeton, Cambridge, and Oxford), and publishers who specialize in technical and academic books (Springer, World Scientific, CRC, and others). Buying mathematics books helps keep these publishers (and their underlying institutions) healthy. They are an active part of the mathematical community, staffed in most cases by people who are themselves mathematicians.
This is particularly important for professional societies. Books and journals have always been an important source of revenue for MAA, AMS, and others—the reduction in book sales over the last few years has hit all of them hard. Most societies try not to let on exactly how bad the situation is, but it’s clear that none of them is having an easy time. Dues cannot cover all the costs of everything professional societies do, and book sales help make up the difference. Buying MAA books helps keep the MAA going.
Another reason to buy is simply that there are lots of great books being published. One effect of recent changes in technology is that publishers can make a profit even from small print runs and sales—not a huge profit, but enough to stay in business. In the past, a small-market book such as a new edition of the works of Évariste Galois could be published only if the publisher was willing to take a loss or if outside funding could be found. Nowadays, it’s possible to do it and still make (a little bit of) money.
Of course, buy good books. If you do, we will get more good books. (Ergo, don’t buy—or make your students buy—books the like of which you want to see less.) There are a lot of exceptional new books out there. There really is a new edition of the works of Galois, just out from the European Mathematical Society. There are innovative textbooks too; Princeton, for example, has just published two: Viewpoints: Mathematical Perspective and Fractal Geometry in Art by Marc Frantz and Annalisa Crannell, and Discrete and Computational Geometry by Satyan L. Devadoss and Joseph O’Rourke. And, of course, mathematicians continue to produce brilliant high-level accounts of powerful new mathematical ideas.
Find something good, buy, enjoy—and you will also have helped keep the conversation going.
Fernando Q. Gouvêa, Carter Professor of Mathematics at Colby College, is the editor of MAA Reviews. He relies on an immense battalion of faithful reviewers and on the help of the MAA's Basic Library List Committee. And, of course, on MAA members: Please visit our page describing the ways you can help MAA Reviews.