Item — HN Reader

A few years ago, I bought a print book on Lulu. Paul Graham had released the book into the public domain (?) and some kind person had spent an hour or so uploading it to Lulu.com and the book was very inexpensive because I only had to pay the low printing costs (perhaps about $8). I just looked on Lulu and could not find the link however. Assuming that it is OK with Paul Graham, it would be great if someone re-uploaded it to Lulu as a free book (i.e., just pay for the printing costs).

This book is just about a mandatory reference for Common Lisp, although I use "ANSI Common LISP" more often as a quick reference.

2 comments

I am confident that Paul has never released the book "into the public domain". He does have the book available at no charge on his web site, but that is not the same thing. Last I knew, Paul owned the copyright (I believe it was reverted to him by the original publisher years after the book was last printed). He has just been generous enough to provide a PDF for all who are interested in reading it.

Over the last four years or so, I keep hearing that Paul is going to republish it (on actual paper). I think he has just been too busy with other things of higher priority to get that done. I hope he doesn't abandon that idea. I think it is an important book that has far too few hard copies available. Online copies are wonderful, and I'm very glad that the book is available in that format, but as can be seen by my multiple bookshelves, dead tree copies still provide a pleasant experience not reproducable by a computer. I know many other hackers share that opinion, and prefer to have the paper copy on the shelf.

So, Paul, if you are listening, is there a chance "On Lisp" will make it to the printer again any time soon?

It takes five seconds to upload the pdf to Lulu yourself and you can take advantage of their discount when buying a book that you yourself produced.