All,
We have been using the Holmqvist book in a small graduate seminar this semester. I have many thoughts about this encyclopedic work, but the one I will share with you today concerns the quality of the printing.
First - let me say that I consider this book an important resource to the eye tracking research community. Hence, I can justify to myself sending a note on this listserv discussing serious problems with the book's production. I apologize if some of you view this as a misuse of the listserv, but you should know that over the years my posts are few and far between, and usually directly on a research point.
THE PROBLEM
One of my students and I have copies in which *many* of the figures are "double printed". So rather than plots with two lines, there are 4 lines etc.
There are many, many, many such problems in almost every chapter. I have attached public links to 3 examples that I have scanned into from my copy (for the "bad" examples) and from a good copy (from one of the student's books).
p. 277 the bad copy had doublelines in Fig 8.18 "a" and "b" and weird coloring that is obscuring the 8.18b.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/56813838/p277-bad.pdf
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/56813838/p277-good.pdf
p. 309 - the polar plots in 10.7a and 10.7b are doubleprinted. Worse (?) in my copy the coordinates in 10.7b go up to 840 (where 360 should be the max), and the labels are weird.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/56813838/p309-bad.pdf
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/56813838/p309-good.pdf
p.348 - contains some interesting gems, a common one (in my book) are the double lines in Fig 10.33a and 10.33b. A unique one is the plot that is printed "behind" the gray box that introduces section 10.8.3.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/56813838/p348-bad.pdf
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/56813838/p348-good.pdf
OUP's reaction is disappointing. They seem to deny that there are any problems with any of the books. I have sent them copies of bad PDFs. At this point they seem willing to placate me by replacing the book with a "new" copy if we send the bad copies to them. However, my seminar is covering chapter 11 this week, we plan to finish the book in two more weeks, and then the book will be "enhanced" for teaching and research by copious amounts of "yellow-staining" and marginalia. So I don't want to let my current copy go until I have a chance to transfer the most important marginalia and yellow-staining to a new copy.
Do anyone out there have any similar experiences with the production quality of this volume? Has anyone out there been similarly rebuffed by OUP?
Yours,
Wayne Gray
**Rensselaer**Rensselaer**Rensselaer**Rensselaer**Rensselaer**
Wayne D. Gray
Professor of Cognitive Science &
Professor of Computer Science &
Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
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for general information see: http://www.rpi.edu/~grayw/
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for the CogWorks Lab see: http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/cogworks/
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