The three Big Red Logic Books have a new look. I’m staying with the red theme, but no longer using the free Amazon KDP online cover-builder which produced their rather muddy colour and muddy swirls. The outsides, then, are a bit less dull. I’m afraid the insides of the paperbacks stay just the same!
More importantly, perhaps, a hardback of Gödel Without (Too Many) Tears is published today. It is currently available from e.g. Barnes and Noble (in the US), Gardners (the UK library book suppliers), Booktopia (in Oz), as well as the local Amazons. I hope it will soon propagate to other sellers like Blackwells. It won’t just appear on bookshop shelves, however: you’ll have to order it.
I’m not really expecting anyone reading this blog to buy it for themselves! However, you might like to recommend the hardback to your local friendly university or college librarian. Some librarians are pretty resistant to buying from Amazon (especially self-published paperbacks). That’s why I’m experimenting with hardback publication. We are going a step up here, using the same print-on-demand providers now used e.g. by CUP for some of their books, with a “proper” ISBN officially assigned to the Logic Matters imprint. It is still pretty cheap as academic hardbacks go — £14 in the UK and comparable prices elsewhere (so this isn’t going to make my fortune: to be honest, I’ll be pretty surprised if I even recoup the set-up costs.)
Of course the PDF version is still freely available, and I’ve kept the paperback version as Amazon-only as that absolutely minimizes the price to students. But I like to think that the book should be available on the shelves in university libraries, so please take a moment to recommend the hardback! Its ISBN is 978-1916906303.
(Apologies by the way to readers down under that the paperback is still not locally printed and hence not cheaply available to you: Amazon say they are working on being able to produce paperbacks in the relevant format “soon” …)
Update: At the moment Amazon UK are giving a very long delivery date for the hardback, but I hope that’s temporary. Amazon US by contrast are giving a relatively short delivery date.