Now that I’m back from SIGGRAPH, I can catch up on all the things. So here’s one: win a free copy of Real-Time Rendering, 4th Edition. Our publisher is giving away three copies, deadline to enter is August 31.

As far as actually receiving a copy of the book, well, if it’s any consolation, none of us authors have a physical copy at this point, either. Our publisher wrote on August 8th:

This reprint should be in the warehouse within the next 3 weeks.  I assume the fulfillment dept will give customer orders priority over author copies.

So it’s a case of the shoemaker’s children go barefoot. Amazon says the book’s back in stock on August 27th.

I do like that the first three chapters are free on Amazon, for Kindle, and Google Play, so I hope that will tide people over until these ship. That this much content was made free was unexpected, a happy decision on the publisher’s part. If you’re done with those chapters and still waiting, don’t forget to read Pete’s now-free books on ray tracing.

I got to see a physical copy of our book at SIGGRAPH, so know such things exist. I also bought the book on Kindle (which at first had some download problem on my iPhone and PC, but downloaded fine the next day) and Google Play (surprised to find it there; same price as Kindle, by some amazing coincidence), as I wanted to see if a layout problem in my local copy was present in the book (happily, it wasn’t – ahhh, the mysteries of LaTeX).

One of the best parts of SIGGRAPH was actually meeting my coauthors. The wild party on the yacht that night in Vancouver Harbor was really something, too, but then I realized I made that up.

Eric, Angelo, Naty, Seb, Tomas, and Michal; photo courtesy of Mauricio Vives