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.
- Free: the full first three chapters of Real-Time Rendering is available as a sample on Google eBooks, linked from this page.
- Free: large excerpts of book chapters up through chapter 5 are at the bottom of this Google Books page.
- Free: Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature lets you search, and seems to contain a good portion of the book, maybe 70% or so.
- “Free” if you have a subscription: access the book at Books24x7. For example, this is how the students and instructors for this class at Cornell access the book, as there is a school-wide subscription.
- Rent for $27.06 by buying used on Amazon for $53.43, then when done, selling it back to Amazon for $27.38.
- Kindle version for $58.28 – yes, we finally have a Kindle version, in color, or so we hear. None of us have seen it yet, and our publisher cannot give us one – Amazon controls these.
- Hardcover book for $64.76 from Amazon, 27% off the list price.
- Google eBook version for $69.42. Another new and interesting option, and again we haven’t seen it.
- At this point we enter the bizarro zone: $95.27 on eBay. This is not an anomaly, I see a bunch of listings on eBay, the cheapest at $74.49.
- The high-water mark is a seller in Massachusetts with a used copy for $220. I can only hope auto-pricing robots are involved.
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.
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! 😉
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.
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.
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?
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.