The Saga of Springer-Verlag and Volume II of Mumford's Selecta

Volume II of David Mumford Selected Papers was published by Springer Science + Business Media, LLC in July 2010, ISBN 978-0-387-72491-1. This is the story of a journey of the three editors, Amnon Neeman, Takahiro Shiota and Ching-Li Chai with the world's second largest publisher in science, technology and medicine.

In spirit, the main narrative tries to be a restaurant review. A restaurant review tells the reader what to expect if he dines there tonight; the review should be informative, but otherwise light and entertaining, and should not take itself too seriously. There is a world famous Springer restaurant, founded in 1842 by the acclaimed chef Julius Springer. Recently the three of us had a lousy meal at their New York branch, stretching over three years. Out of a possible five stars we'd be inclined to give them half a star, if we were in a very generous mood we might be willing to go up to one whole star. The story is our report on this meal; we hope others might find it useful.

  1. The main narrative: The saga of Springer-Verlag and volume II of Mumford's Selecta

    an update of footnote 8 on page 8

  2. More technical stuff for the intrepid: An elaboration of some of the problems with a few files from Springer

    The bulk of this pretty technical document is an email message from Takahiro Shiota to the Springer production team in New York on December 1, 2009. In it is a detailed analysis of various defects of two "for print" files from Springer, and a quality comparison with a JSTOR file, a scan produced by Springer and a Springer ebook chapter.

    (Besides integrable systems, Taka is also an expert in computer vision who coauthored Lecture Notes in Computer Science 662 with David Mumford and Mark Nitzberg. His analysis was quite an education for Amnon and Ching-Li.)

  3. Six graphic files attached to the 12/01/2009 email