Jan 23 2003

Frequently asked questions:

Can this book be used to teach a course?
For examples, check introductory course homepages.

Why webbook?
Publishing a book today often means preparing a typeset manuscript for a publisher, who binds it and distributes it, often at prices that make it inaccessible to students from less affluent institutions. Many man years go into preparing a highly specialized manuscript aiming at a small specialized audience, and the economics of royalties has to be weighted against the impact that a more accessible manuscript might have. It is better to have a webbook accessible to one and all, continuously improved, at the forefront rather than chiseled in stone.

Inspite of the undeniable pleasure of taking a book to bed, a technical ebook is already superior to a paper text in several ways. The main advantages of the pdf version of this webbook are twofold:
1) Good browser shifts downloading to the page you click on, so even 800 pages book can be read in real time.
2) the equations, sections, references and index cross-referencing are hyperlinked, so one can effortlessly jump back and forth through the text.

Further down the road, it should be possible to have the book printed on order by one of the companies that do that - so far getting companies such as Kinko's to actually spit out the book has been somewhat painful.

Research is today mediated by the Los Alamos server, not by what gets published 18 months later in a journal. The rationale for publishing is the peer review (which is the main positive thing in the system), citations (which are immensely useful in keeping track of literature, and some indication of impact), and archiving the research results.

In introducing a field, there are contradictory impulses to conciseness (so the key ideas get across within reasonable reading time) and scholarly completeness. Webbook allows for branching into levels of details suited to individual reader's interests, and providing up-to-date links to other relevant material.

A complete book takes years to prepare - webbook makes it possible to make accessible the (semi)completed parts as the work progresses.

It is often more instructive to work through a solution of a problem than be given only the abstract theory. Webbook can help by providing links to student projects and problem solutions.

Will this book be published?
No - there are too many books on field theory as is.

The relevant parts of a good text will be printed and perused, no less than a good electronic preprint. A bad text should be junked anyway. If a student in Buenos Aires or Salamaca reads a chapter and is wiser for it, that is all it takes to make us happy. The webbook has done something to further little piece of wisdom that we know and love.

Predrag Cvitanovic'