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A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages

The 1972 paper by Alan Kay, in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Dynabook. (via Coding Horror.)

This note speculates about the emergence of personal, portable
information manipulators and their effects when used by both
children and adults. Although it should be read as science
fiction, current trends in miniaturization and price reduction
almost guarantee that many of the notions discussed will actually
happen in the near future.

College Publications

As a result of a refereeing request, I took a look at the website of College Publications, and was very pleased with what I saw. It is a non-profit publisher founded by Jane Spurr and the omnipresent (at least in logic) Dov Gabbay. From their "About us" page:

...objectives...:

  • To bring College Publications to a level with Oxford (OUP) and Cambridge (CUP) in terms of publishing capability.
  • To provide the community with a non-profit making, highly prestigious publishing outlet that will break the monopoly that commercial publishers have.
  • To publish books that can be purchased at reasonable prices, making information accessible to all.

Accordingly, College Publications can publish books at a range of 15–25 dollars per average 300 page book, giving substantially better royalties to authors than other publishers.

...

College Publications does not take copyright and authors are free to use their material elsewhere, and even to put the book on the web once sales have achieved profitability.

The existence of this publisher is very good for the kind of things that LtU stands for in much the same way that Logical Methods in Computer Science is, and supposedly community focussed organisations such as the ACM are not. Take a look at their PL offerings in their computing series, edited by Ian Mackie.