Our book can be pre-ordered now on Amazon

I wrote a couple of chapters in this book on Artificial Intelligence methods in the Environment Sciences.  It appears, from the Amazon publication date, that Springer has targeted Dec 2008 for its final publication and that its retail price will be nearly $90.  Amazon lists it for $72.

The book is based on a workshop that six of us conducted in Corpus Christi in January 2007.   If anyone's going to use it a college text, it won't happen until Fall of 2009.  So, the book has taken three years to go from concept to actual use. We'd have done a lot better by publishing it online instead of using a traditional publisher.  The book would have been out sooner, and the information in it would have been more timely.  Also, that steep $90 retail price? All of it goes towards publications overhead -- we waived our royalties in a bid to keep the price as low as it could be.  If we had published it as an e-book or through an on-demand publisher, the price would have been essentially just the cost of printing.

Still, to academic types, a book published by a traditional publisher "counts" more than a self-published e-book.  And so, even though it makes no economic sense to do things this way, you have to pay $72 for the book at Amazon.

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