Most of the time we write about technology topics close to our hearts, and open source software is certainly one of those topics. However, this post i

Escape from Big Publishing - by Bruce Davie

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2023-05-29 13:00:20

Most of the time we write about technology topics close to our hearts, and open source software is certainly one of those topics. However, this post is also about the process of writing books, which we’ve been doing for almost 30 years now. How we came to embrace open source as part of our book publishing endeavors is a story going back to the early days of Systems Approach.

There was a ripple in the world of academic publishing a couple of weeks back when the entire editorial board of Neuroimage walked out in protest at the high publication charges being imposed by Elsevier. Our own story of freeing content from Elsevier is a bit less dramatic but still makes for an interesting tale. Let’s start with the origins of Computer Networks: A Systems Approach, which we first published in 1996, when both the Internet and the publishing world were very different places than they are today.

Larry started the book on his own in 1994 and there was considerable interest in the publishing world to sign the contract for a new textbook on networking. The Internet had just become mainstream enough to make the cover of Time magazine, as Internet access started to spread beyond academic and research institutions. One of the distinguishing features of Larry’s proposal was that it put the Internet and its protocols at the heart of networking, whereas other books at the time treated TCP/IP as just one example among many competing approaches. In the end, Larry signed with then-independent Morgan Kaufmann Publishers (MKP), whose main claim to fame was that they also published the iconic Computer Architecture book by Hennessy and Patterson. Not only did we like the idea of being associated with that book, but working with a small publisher, we discovered, meant that you had the attention of the entire company when your book was getting ready for publication. 

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