I had a (albeit rather brief up to now) look at the first volume The History of the GPU - Steps to Invention, as I have access to a library subscribing to Springer's ebooks. I like John Peddie's Chasing Pixel columns published on the IEEE Computer Society's website. The chapters that I read in the book are extended versions of his columns.

What stood out very negatively for me, though, were some of the image credits. For example, we have "Courtesy of CC BY-SA 3.0":

The attribution clause in the Creative Commons license means that you have to mention the name (or pseudonym) of the author (Wikimedia author "Appaloosa", in this case). Something which is clearly missing here.

In another example, the image credit simply reads "Courtesy of eBay" - which to me reads as "I found the photo at someone's eBay auction". As if eBay even had the right to grant image licenses for book publication. One would imagine that for a book series where each volume costs about $40, Springer would have cleared the image rights more diligently.

PS: In the first book, you can also find this gem, misspelling the VOGONS Wiki.

Thank you for your answer

mxmxmx2 wrote on 2023-02-24, 13:14:

I had a (albeit rather brief up to now) look at the first volume The History of the GPU - Steps to Invention, as I have access to a library subscribing to Springer's ebooks. I like John Peddie's Chasing Pixel columns published on the IEEE Computer Society's website. The chapters that I read in the book are extended versions of his columns.

Yes, i learnt about his books by reading his articles on computer.org. And even in the articles, i found the images sources very approximative.
Assuming he has a PhD, he must be more than familiar with the need of keeping track of sources, every scientific paper has a reference section (hello BibTeX, long time no see).
In fact, some (most ?) of his articles have a reference section, but it does not contains image references.

I totally agree that he seems to take this lightly.

mxmxmx2 wrote on 2023-02-24, 14:35:

PS: In the first book, you can also find this gem, misspelling the VOGONS Wiki.

image003.jpg

Oh nice catch ! Yes, i definitely don't want to blindly pay $40 if the book is full of errors.
I will try to have access to one and have a look before buying (or not).

I'm reading them. I'm halfway through the second book.
In my opinion, some of the text comes from the author's previous writings over the years for magazines, reports, analyzes or other books , now compiled, updated and modified in his presentation. You can tell by the style, writing, way of saying things.

Are we sure it's not an AI generated rip off?

I still haven't decided if I want to buy them or not.

The last technical book I read was interesting but disappointing at the same time.
It's "Computer Busses : design and applications" W. Buchanan
I also felt as if the chapters were written independently and assembled to form a book. (Also a lot of typos ans small errors).
But since I bought the book used for <5€... It's okay.

I think I will wait until I find Jon Peddie books for cheap too.