Apress — the most dedicated publisher of Common Lisp books, famous for giving the world "Practical Common Lisp" and "Common Lisp Recipes" — has approached me to publish "Programming Algorithms", and, after some consideration, I have agreed. So, the book will be released under the title "Programming Algorithms in Lisp" and with some slight modifications to the content.
It was not an easy decision to make. Ultimately, my goal for the book is to make it as widely read as possible. For these three months since it had been published on Leanpub, it was downloaded more than 1500 times, and almost 250 people have also donated some money in its support. The paperback book was shipped to around 40 locations around the globe: even to Australia and Colombia. Besides, I have received lots of positive feedback and some improvement suggestions. I'm very grateful and happy that it has seen such positive reception.
In my opinion, the book has the potential to hit at least an order of magnitude more readers. However, to achieve that, targeted promotion effort is necessary. I have already mostly exhausted the capacity of the free PR channels I had access to (such as Hacker News, Reddit, and Twitter). I had a long-term promotion strategy though, but it required spending the time and (possibly) financial resource that could be used elsewhere.
The Apress edition of the book will not be free, but it will have the full power of this respected publisher behind it. So, my hope is that thus it will reach an even wider audience. Very soon I will have to take down the free version of the book, so this is the last chance to download it (if you or some of your friends planned to do it). The book webpage will remain active and will collect relevant information and news, so stay tuned...
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