If you want the ebook (PDF, no DRM, full first-sale rights) version of Give Us a Dollar and We’ll Give You Back Four, buy it now: It will disappear on or about August 1, 2013. The paperback and hardback versions will still be available for some time to come.
If you want Graphing Public Library Benefits (only available as an absurdly cheap PDF no DRM full first-sale rights ebook), buy it now: It will disappear on or about August 1, 2013. And will be gone, period.
Both will be (partially) replaced by Crawford’s Folly Volume 1 The Compleat Give Us a Dollar and We’ll Give You Back Four, Vol 1, Libraries by Size. That will only be available as an 8.5″ x 11″ PDF ebook, more than 300 353 pages long (the current ebook is 6″ x 9″ but I couldn’t make the existing graphs work in the narrower column), in two versions: single-user and site-“license” (still a sale, but with explicit permission for multiuser simultaneous access and downloading from a server for some reasonably-controlled group of people up to and including all libraries within a state). It’s a remarkable book in several ways, and provides a detailed view of the benefits of America’s public libraries in 2010 that’s unlikely to be equaled in the future.
The (partially) refers to Chapter 20, Libraries by State, and I anticipate that another 8.5″ x 11″ PDF ebook combining Chapter 20, the second half of the comments published in C&I, and one scatterplot for each of 49 states will emerge some time later in August. It will be Vol. 2, Libraries by State, and will similarly be available in single-user and multiuser editions. Volume 2 will be 191 pages long.
I’m guessing each volume will go for $9.99 single-user, $30 site license.
Update 7/29/13: Note the change from “more than 300” to “353” pages for volume 1, the addition of page count for volume 2. Both of these will appear around August 1-2…and there will also be a combined print-only version that omits all the multicolor line graphs so that it’s printable. (It includes all the scatterplots–around 250 in all–and the commentary.) That book is 425 8.5 x 11″ pages. Since it lacks some of the material in The Compleat…, the obvious title is The inCompleat Give Us a Dollar and We’ll Give You Back Four. The print version will be much easier to use to make comparisons among states and sizes of libraries. It will probably sell for something like $24.95, give or take.
