Letters Is this the Future of Academic Publishing? Free copies down loaded, registered by lulu.com 12000 William. B. Langdon, University of Essex, UK The Field Guide to Genetic Programming [1] has now been freely available as a PDF to down load for three months. According to gures provided by the publisher, lulu.com, during the rst three months it was down loaded 11533 times. If the current trend (see Figure 1) continues, the total for the rst year would be in the region of 27000 down loads. While not quite in the same league as Harry Potter, if down loaded copies were equivalent to physical copies, the Field Guide would still be amongst the most successful computer science books. However is it fair to equate something which is delivered at no charge in a few seconds directly to you, with a physical book, which costs real (and in some cases signi cant amounts of) money and takes days or even weeks to arrive? Obviously not. However from an academic author ™s perspective, what matters is not what it cost but the impact it has. How many of the people who down load a free PDF will read past the rst page? One suspects that the proportion of customers who buy a physical book but never look between the covers, is much lower. There does not seem to be a rapid and reliable way to nd out. After several years, books start to show up in citation counts. May be we shall have to wait for these in order to estimate the impact of electronic books. Despite explicit use of a creative commons license, which explicitly forbids others from laying claim to it or commercially exploiting it, the Field Guide ™s PDF appeared brie ‚y on a web site which attempted to charge for it. Another, as yet unrealised, fear is that it will be plagiarised. It does not seem possible, even for commercial publishers, to prevent all abuses of Internet resources. 29 Mar 12 Apr 26 Apr 10 May 24 May 07 Jun 21 Jun Fig. 1: Copies of œA Field Guide to Genetic Programming  down loaded since its launch at EuroGP on 26 March 2008. There were more than 800 down loads in the rst 24 hours. The second steep rise corresponds to the free book being mentioned on a prominent scienti c blog in the USA. According to a very unscienti c straw poll, those about to publish books on evolutionary computing, are split. Some still intend to seek contracts with major multinational publishers. And some are intending that their new book will be available as a free electronic down load from the Internet. The authors ™ aim, even before writing the book, was that it should be as accessible as possible. Hence the choice of electronic publishing, backed up by a minimal cost print on demand service with rapid postal delivery direct to the reader, from lulu.com, Amazon and Google books, etc. This strategy seems to be working. Bibliography [1] Riccardo Poli, William B. Langdon, and Nicholas Freitag McPhee. A eld guide to genetic programming. Published via lulu.com and freely available at www.gp- eld-guide.org.uk, 2008. (With contributions by J. R. Koza). SIGEVOlution Spring 2008, Volume 3, Issue 1

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