Last year, I wrote “The Math You Need.” The idea was to condense the usual undergrad math curriculum into a single, self-contained book. It starts from scratch and covers the material the way working mathematicians think about it (what’s often called the “Bourbaki” style): the clear and concise definition → theorem → proof approach, rather than focusing on ad hoc examples and computations. I couldn’t cover every possible topic in one standalone book, but there are chapters on group theory, commutative algebra, linear algebra, topology, real analysis, complex analysis, number theory, and probability.
It turns out that there hadn’t been this sort of omnibus reference of undergrad material before, and the style of it is one that I think had been sorely lacking in undergrad or early grad level textbooks. It’s the book I would loved to have had back when I was an undergrad or studying for qualifying exams, and I even find myself looking up things in my own book now.
I made this silver ring for a comic book fan long ago. It’s the Kingdom Come Superman logo (very cool alternative universe thing). I was very happy with the paint/liquid dripping effect. The colours are actually baked in ceramic paint; “super” durable.
@DamonWakes
A wax ring is milled by a CNC machine with a very, very fine cutter. The pockets that hold the ceramic colours are a good depth so it’ll withstand way more than a lifetime of wear and tear. I created a 3D model first and then figured out a milling strategy. The lost wax method is used for casting. After that, it’s pretty standard jeweller bench work.
I definitely could not get that level of precision by hand. I’m glad you like it! If you have other questions about the process, feel free to DM me.
I think I have complimented you on the book of hints before (I hope!), but just for anyone seeing the link for the first time: this is an absolute masterclass on how to make a hint book. I have a box in my office that contains all my favorite video game manuals and hint books that I have ever bought. Yours is too good to be in the box, because I am actively chipping away at Nox Archaist What you did here is make an all-time classic.
I did have really wonderful source material to work with (I’m biased, but I think NA does a lot right) and Mark Lemmert and Chris Torrence helped nail things down. Rikkles’s maps, unspoiled on github are better than anything I could do. Nevertheless, I enclosed my maps of Bayport here.
My favorite story from writing it is still noting Mark making a guy named Nox Tremmel really grouchy. I thought it contrasted well with Nox Ffred, (Mark’s old name on the Ultima forums), who helped you at a couple critical points, so there wasn’t too much “what a great guy the author is.”
Mark’s response? “Oh wow! I didn’t realize Tremmel was Lemmert backwards!”
Oh, one other thing, with Mark’s permission, I went for a more “build your party quickly and see quirks/what’s important” angle in a text guide on GameFAQs. It won FAQ of the month for December '23.
I want to update it with the Lord of Storms expansion when I get the chance … also, some of it was written with speech-to-text and I didn’t have Mark’s and Chris’s help. So I’ve noted some typos etc. or more to fix.
It should be noted that I earn not a nickel from free downloads. The book has been out of print for many years, so whoever put it up on the Internet Archive is ripping me off. But that’s okay, I guess. I mean, it’s the 21st century. The genie is out of the bottle.
“Moons Road” was my first novel. I don’t feel it holds up very well, 40 years later. It’s fun, but it wouldn’t be publishable today. However, I’m proud of “The Wall at the Edge of the World” (my 2nd). A couple of years ago I re-released “Wall” in a self-published edition, which you can find on Amazon either for Kindle or as a paperback. The new edition is identical to the long-out-of-print original.
And then there’s the Leafstone saga – four books, must be read in the proper order. It’s a slightly different take on epic fantasy. There are no pitched battles with knights in armor, not a single one. There are, however, evil wizards, dragons, romance, and bits of comic relief.
Also, BTW, if you check out my collection of stories, “The House of Broken Dolls,” you may perhaps intuit that the title story started out as an IF idea. That’s why the main setting has half a dozen tiny art studios. It turned into something very different, but that element is faintly detectable.
Sincere question: if it’s been out of print for many years, wouldn’t you earn not a nickel no matter how people acquired it, since even if they purchased a physical copy they’d be getting it from a used book seller instead of the publisher?
@Jim_Aikin If you have the full rights over your text (and don’t share them with the publisher) you could host your text yourself, with a pay-what-you-want?
That’s basically true, except for the phrase “no matter how people acquired it.” I still own the rights. The term (not to belabor the point, as I’m sure you understand this) is “copyright.” That means “the right to make copies.” An online streaming representation or download of the text is a copy. If someone buys a used paperback or is given the paperback by a friend, no new copy has been made, so there is no violation of copyright.
I’m not a lawyer, but that’s my understanding of the law. The U.S. Congress, being profoundly dysfunctional, has not been able to figure out how to regulate online transmission of copyrighted works. But even if they did, the Internet is not confined to the U.S. A server in Uruguay or Tajikistan could offer downloadable content, and U.S. authors could do nothing about it.
That’s true. Or, as I did with “The Wall at the Edge of the World,” I could prepare a new self-published edition and make it available through Amazon KDP at a specific price.
I’m not actually complaining about the availability of “Moons Road.” I think it’s kind of cute. I feel the novel is deeply flawed, and I have no intention of reprinting it myself. If, however, an online pirate were to offer free copies of my Leafstone saga, I would be mightily pissed off. I haven’t looked to see if anybody is doing that – but in the end, being pissed off isn’t very useful. As far as I’m aware, there really is no practical way to stop this kind of abuse. Your only options are to offer your own work for free (as generally happens in the IF world) or to be so obscure that nobody bothers to pirate it.
You could google your book title once a month and (if you find someone posting your text) contact the webhost or cooyright judges and tell them to stop this. The question remains: Is it worth the effort?
And further, if you were as successful as, say Donna Leon or Rowling, you could pay agents to hunt for illegal hostings/books. But I guess that is out of scope.
Also not a lawyer, but my understanding was that what the Internet Archive is doing in this case—buying one copy, scanning it, then allowing only a single user to view that scan at any given time, with no ability to download the files for later use—is more or less equivalent to a library buying one copy and then lending it out to a single person at a time. (But last I heard it’s still being litigated.)
But my confusion was more about the “I earn not a nickel” part, since if it’s out of print, I don’t see how you’d be making money off it in the absence of the Archive. There’s been a big push on the topic of software piracy to reframe “there is potential profit that we think we could have earned, if we rereleased our software, but we didn’t” as “there is money that already belonged to us that has been stolen by pirates”, and in cases like this it doesn’t make much sense to me—it’s not like the Internet Archive is offering a free alternative to buying the book from the publisher, since it’s, well…out of print. (If you decided to republish it, of course, that would be a different matter.)
The practice of buying a copy of a book, scanning it, and letting one person look at the scan at a time (while keeping the physical book out of circulation) is actually something public libraries also do, and had done for many years without incident. What the Internet Archive is getting sued over is something they did early in the pandemic: in response to the widespread closure of brick-and-mortar libraries, they removed the one-person-at-a-time restriction, which is obviously much less legally defensible. I don’t know how long the restrictions were lifted for but AFAIK they’re back now, so what the IA is doing now actually isn’t what’s being litigated. Although that doesn’t mean there’s no possibility of a broad ruling that might also effectively ban one-person-at-a-time “lending” of scans; I have heard librarians express concern about that, although they weren’t legal experts and neither am I so it’s hard to gauge how plausible the worries are.
You can submit a request to the Internet Archive even if they legally obtained it.
As far as I can tell, things get delisted all of the time at their discretion without going to court or getting lawyers involved. They could also choose to disable borrowing without delisting it, so they would keep their archived digital version until copyright expires in however many decades.
Ah… lifting the one-person-at-a-time restriction may have been the thing that emboldened publishers to bring this suit now (they’d been looking for a wedge for a case for several years now, I believe), but the judgement in Hachette vs. Internet Archive clearly says you can NOT scan and lend a copy:
At bottom, IA’s fair use defense rests on the notion that lawfully acquiring a copyrighted print book entitles the recipient to make an unauthorized copy and distribute it in place of the print book, so long as it does not simultaneously lend the print book. But no case or legal principle supports that notion. Every authority points the other direction. Of course, IA remains entitled to scan and distribute the many public domain books in its collection. It also may use its scans of the Works in Suit, or other works in its collection, in a manner consistent with the uses deemed to be fair in Google Books and HathiTrust. What fair use does not allow, however, is the mass reproduction and distribution of complete copyrighted works in a way that does not transform those works and that creates directly competing substitutes for the originals. Because that is what IA has done with respect to the Works in Suit, its defense of fair use fails as a matter of law.
(the Authors Guild vs. Google Books/Hathi Trust case had ruled that full text search was “transformative” enough to be different enough from reading/distributing full books that it did fall under fair use)
And then, immediately:
IA also argues that it made fair use of the Publishers’ copyrights during the National Emergency Library. The analysis above applies even more forcefully to the NEL, during which IA amplified its unauthorized lending of ebook versions of the Works in Suit by lifting the one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio. IA’s defense of fair use with respect to the NEL therefore also fails.
–from Judge Koeltl’s judgement, which you can find online in a bunch of places, but that’s one of them.
