Now How Much Would You Pay?

In the past few week I’ve learned of a number of ways to access our book’s content. Some are just plain new, others I simply didn’t know about. Here’s a summary of sources I know, listed from lowest to highest price.

I’ve heard we’ll eventually have a “rent for six months” option for the Kindle version, which makes sense for students. Frankly, the Kindle and Google prices hit me as high: you don’t actually own anything, in the sense that you can’t sell it later. Our publisher says Amazon controls their Kindle price – beats me how that works. On the other hand, electronic versions have the advantages of weight (none extra) and searchability. Me, I love having my own internal PDF version of the book that I can search and copy & paste from. It’s unfortunate that PDFs are too easy to pass on to others.

Personally, I like the Google eBook and Books24x7 concept the best, where you can access the book from any web browser by simply logging in (no installation needed, no need to authorize the device, etc.). This method of access seems to be at a good balance point between reader usability and author/publisher protection.

5 thoughts on “Now How Much Would You Pay?

  1. haffax

    Personally I prefer an actual book. I own a copy of the second edition, one of my most used books. I’d buy the real book version of the 4th edition the moment it becomes available. Which is when exactly? I could buy the 3rd edition, but by now it is out for so long that I fear the 4th edition is going to get out the day after I bought 3rd one. So, I’m going to wait for next edition. Bring it on already! 😉

  2. Eric Post author

    Well, I know we’re not planning on a 4th edition this year for sure – I’m working on revising another book. While publishers like to have a new edition every few years, we’ve been going by two informal rules: “has the GPU significantly changed?” and “have we forgotten the pain and stress of putting out a new edition?” Right now I don’t think the GPU’s massively different than it was 4 years ago. There’s DirectCompute and so on, but this is not really mainstream. So a third rule will probably kick in at some point, “is enough of the material in the current edition embarrassingly out of date?” I’m personally not quite there yet.

  3. trooper09

    I know this is a rather old blog entry. So I bought the third edition book and 4 months later the kindle edition arrived. My only request is updating the blog to give us a head’s up when you are planning on releasing the fourth edition, so we can trade/sell our books for a lot more money to buy the newest edition. 🙂 I’d appreciate it.

  4. TimRex

    So, it’s 2016.. Vulkan is now a thing.. Metal is here.. Consoles are a generation ahead.. Do you think the landscape changed enough to warrant a 4th Edition? Or maybe, have practices changed enough?

  5. Eric Post author

    Vulkan/Metal/DirectX 12 avoids some overhead, so that’s worth a page or two, but the focus of “Real-Time Rendering” is algorithms, not APIs per se. So these new interfaces don’t get my typing fingers itching. I do wish we had the time to revise RTR3 and put out a fourth edition (and of course our publisher would love it), but we’re all too busy. There are definitely bits I’d want to rewrite and expand. However, whatever we add means something else must disappear – the book’s at its size limit. SMAA, EVSM and the other SMs, SAO and the other AOs, weighted product transparency and other transparency algorithms and knowledge, those are the big ones that come to mind. Some further DOF and motion blur coverage. Tessellation is getting a bit of traction, but hasn’t taken the world by storm. What’s funny is that I think mobile and VR have slowed “practical” bleeding-edge graphics research down, in that slower machines (mobile) and faster frame rates (VR) means more expensive algorithms are not where much of the thrust is currently.

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