Back in May, I announced the availability of an electronic (PDF)
edition of Edmund Laport's 1952 text "Radio Antenna Engineering",
which I'd created by scanning a copy of the book after I confirmed
that the original copyright had expired. The reaction to this has
been quite satisfying - it's been downloaded over 200 times via my
BitTorrent server, and at least as much more from one or another HTTP
server.

A few weeks ago, I received an excellent suggestion from Ed KI4AGL.
He proposed that I upload the PDF to LuLu.com, a "publish and print on
demand" company, so that people who wanted a hardcopy of this book
could purchase one conveniently.

I hadn't heard of LuLu, so I checked them out, and was impressed by
what I saw. It turned out to be quite easy to set up an account,
upload a slightly-tweaked version of the book's PDF, create a cover
for it, and make it available to purchasers. Ed ordered one, and
wrote me yesterday to say that it has arrived and that it looks good -
the text and pictures all came out clearly. LuLu describes their
product as being "bookstore-quality paperbacks" and from Ed's report
it sounds like that's a fair description.

As published through LuLu, "Radio Antenna Engineering" is a 6-by-9-
inch softcover, printed on 60-pound paper stock, with a glued-edge
"perfect binding". It's what's usually called a "trade paperback"
edition, the same size as the original hardcover edition, and has all
of the text and drawings and photographs. The large foldout map of
the continental United States, with diagrams of the coverage patterns
of certain MF broadcast stations, has been reduced down to fit on a
single 6-by-9 page.

The price for the book is set by LuLu - they charge by the page
and add a flat fee for the binding. I published it using LuLu's "no
royalty, no commission" service, which they've set up specifically to
encourage people to keep obscure material in print. Postage is
additional, depending on how you choose to have it shipped. With
basic (media-mail) postal delivery in the U.S., the book comes to a
bit less than $20.

You can order it from: http://www.lulu.com/content/159004

I've added this information and link to my page at
http://snulbug.mtview.ca.us/books/Ra...naEngineering/ on which
you can find the BitTorrent download files, and links to an HTTP
server which has the PDFs available.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Hosting the Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!