[This review is for the paperback edition.]



The cliche is that librarians hate books, a saying that is obviously unfair but that many library patrons have found to contain more than a grain of truth. More and more, it seems that academic publishers are none too fond of books themselves. This morning, my copy of Subsystems of Second Order Arithmetic arrived, and I could tell just by the thickness of the package that I'd been stung by an inferior digital reprint again. While Cambridge University Press is certainly no stranger to digital reprints, we used to be able to count on them for two things. First, they used to reserve digital reprinting for their back list, not for books that had just been released. Second, they used to be candid on their website about which editions of which books were digitally reprinted, but Cambridge's webpage for the paperback edition of Subsystems makes no mention of it being a digital reprint. The good news is that Amazon's Lexington, Kentucky, digital printers have finally got their print quality up to that of a $100 personal laser printer. Even with the muddy cover, the mediocre paper, and the Orwellianly-named "perfect binding", we should give them credit for that step forward.



So why haven't I said anything about the content of the book? My perusal of the library's copy and my attendance at talks given by practitioners of Reverse Mathematics suggest to me that it is first rate and, unlike so much stuff done in mathematical logic, of substantial interest to mathematicians in general. But anything more will have to wait for my review of the hardback edition that I'll be ordering today. This digital reprint is being returned.



[5/17/2010 update: The hardback edition (ordered direct from the publisher) arrived today, and (unlike the first printing in our campus library) it's print-on-demand, too. Sigh. Are there any publishers left who care about the craftsmanship of making books?]

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