Re: Textbook Status

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

>What is the status of the Textbook? I've looked at the draft textbook
>on the ftp site and it looks pretty good. Any plans on when to
>finalize and print it? I'd like to order a copy if possible.
>
>Also, how's the dictionary coming along? Has it been finalized yet?

The short answer is that the status of the dictionary and the textbook are
no more and no less than you see on the web/ftp sites.  Neither is finalized,
and there is no active work on either towards finalization.  (well, every once
in a while I fiddle with a couple of dictionary definitions on my home
machine which has the master, but only as a time filler).

The two major reason for this are that the collectivity called by some
"Lojban Central" that does mostof the publication work, has too little
volunteer time and too many critical Lojban tasks to be able to allocate
a lot of time to a long-term task (however high may be its priority), and that
since the printing costs of the reference grammar have not been covered yet by
sales, we would not have any money to publsih any books even if we did get
them done.

The break even point on the reference grammar is around 500 books.  We have
sold around 210, with sales averaging 1-2 a week.  Obviously, we have to
change the economics significantly in order to have money to publish more
books in less than 3 years.  This means getting our snail mailing list
caught up and selling lots of books to them, as well as expaanding the Lojban
 market by reaching out to new people.  For the latter, we are putting highest
publishing priority on a short paperback to replace the current "level 0"
introductory packet that we currently send new people.  This packet costs
us between $3 and $5 to send, and only 10-20% of people who ask for information
ever pay us the $5 we ask for this package.  A "cheap paperback" will hopefully
cost us half as much, be better written, and hence attract more people.
That will almost certainly be the next book publsihed, because the work
needed to produce is much less than any other, and the publsihing expense is
a small fraction of that for other books we are planning, and is money we have
to spend anyway to support new inquiries.

The other shorter term publication will be a pocket dictionary.  This will
be LESS and not more/better than what is currently on the Web.  The essential
task will be to produce useful definitions for the cmavo list, and compress/
format the dictionary down to a reasonable size.  This compression will make
the pocket dictionary VERY incomplete, especially on the English to Lojban
side.  Buit again the book will be relatively cheap compared to our hardcover
tomes - alimited edition pocket dictionary with no English to Lojban (basically
the gismu and cmavo and rafsi lists) has been selling (as it were - we only
made 10 copies) for $10.

AS for the quality and status of what is on the Web site: since the language
has been baselined, the description of the language will not be changing much
in terms of technical details, nor has it changed much in the last 5 years
except in areas that are used primarily by very experienced Lojbanists.
What this means is that the dictionary definitions, such as they are, are
almost certainly "correct", though they may leave something to be desired in
terms of clarity.

The draft textbook is  very drafty, being a compendium of two separate efforts
to write such a textbook (chapter 1 is the start of the second effort,
and I never even finished that first chapter; the remaining chapters are
from my original 1989 draft textbook of 6 lessons, which John Cowan broke
up into 20-30 pieces, dropped completely those that were nontrivial to
bring up-to-date, made minor corrections, and then organized into the
current chapter order.)  It probably cannot even be completed in its current
 form, since I, the primary author of the stuff, have never even read what John
did to it.  I was writing to an outline that tracked grammar and vocabulary
concepts, and the current arrangement effectively randomizes that outline.
It is likley that at some point, John or someone will go through one more
time, delete any sections that contradict the reference grammar, make some more
minor corrections, and call this the "first textbook", and we may publish
this in a relatively limited edition (since I am sure that I can do MUCH
better, when I actually get around to writing a textbook again, and would
not want to have a thousand copuies of THAT book sitting around in my
basement for a couple years.

The primary activity of Lojban will remain on computers, both via the net
where it seems that we have a slow but steady growth in people trying to
write text on Lojban List, and in downloaded copies of our Web stuff.
We hope to have a parser that matches the final reference grammar formal
grammar (the parser on the web/ftp sites was made more than two years before
the referebce grammar was done, and has many minor differences from the book,
most of which do not affect beginners, but still leaves the current parser
quite unsatisfactory.)

My wife Nora has also been working on an enhanced glosser, which will
take parser output and produce an English gloss that contains some grammatical
information.  Far from a "Lojban-to_English translator, it will make it much
easier for people to read Lojban texts that they see on-line without having to
look every word up in the dictionary.  She is hoping to have an alpha test
version of this within a couple of weeks, if a similar alpha parser is ready by
 then.

I am updating the random sentence generator to the same grammar level, so that
we have a test generator for the glosser (the glosser WILL NOT handle
ungrammatical text at all).

As for other key materials on-line, the gismu and cmavo lists are stable.
I have added maybe 1500 characters of explanatory text to the gismu
list between the 26 Sept 94 version on the ftp site and my home master,
which has not been changed since December 1995. (I should probably uopload
the latter, though, after I check it to make sure that all changes are
indeed valid).

In the case of the cmavo list, dated 14 June 1994 on the ftp site, there were
a couple of changes required after that date because of new cmavo added
during the final resolution of grammar issues in producing the reference
grammar.  Just last month I discovered two cmavo had never been added to the
list, and someone needs to make sure my list tracks with the parser and
reference grammar one last time before i put the file up with the added
words.  Prior to adding those two words, my previous edit of the file was
back in January 1996, well before the book was done.

Hope this more than answers your question about status.  If you know any
corporate donors or wealthy patrons who will make our financial
situation good, we will probably talk about publishing books more quickly.
But the reference grammar cost more than $17K to publish, and that is
a lot of monmey for me while rasing two kids.

lojbab
----
lojbab                                                lojbab@access.digex.net
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                        703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: ftp.access.digex.net /pub/access/lojbab
    or see Lojban WWW Server: href="http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/";
    Order _The Complete Lojban Language_ - see our Web pages or ask me.