Economy of Machinery and Manufacture [Paperback]

Charles Babbage (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 140432237X | ISBN-13: 978-1404322370 | Publication Date: July 3, 2002

Economy of Machinery and Manufacture

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 266 pages
• Publisher: IndyPublish (July 3, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 140432237X
• ISBN-13: 978-1404322370
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,297,089 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Historic Tome, But VERY Overpriced, January 22, 2004

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Economy of Machinery and Manufacture (Paperback)

In the history of computing, Charles Babbage is commonly heralded as the first name. His Difference and Analytical Engines are regarded by historians of science as the first computers.

This book is a seminal description of his beliefs, inspired in part and intertwined with what he learned during the construction of his Engines. Anyone interested in the history of computers should find her way to this book.

In it, you can find explicitly the struggles of the early Industrial Revolution and on who owned a worker's labour. His success in building his Engine led him to the broader view that a tradesman's skill was fungible, if it could be decomposed into its simplest steps, and those optimised, presumably by machinery. This view would foreshadow the rest of the Industrial Revolution, to this day, as machinery (not necessarily computers, mind you) became more sophisticated. Plus, you can see elements in it of Frederick Taylor's time and motion studies of the early 20th century, that were then applied in American factories.

Indeed, if you abstract away the idea of algorithm from computing, you can see that the book describes our modern conception of it.

But there is one huge problem with this book. Its price. At ninety dollars, it is far too high. The contents are in the public domain since the author has been dead for over 100 years. So the publisher does not have to pay royalties. Plus, the publisher did not have to conduct any research to get the book. It has been in and out of print since it first came out in the 19th century. All the publisher needed to do was get an old copy, scan it into a computer, proofread it and then sent it out to a printing firm, with a new choice of fonts. In the worst case, instead of scanning it with an OCR program, the publisher would have had to hire someone at barely above minimum wage to read an old edition and type it into a computer.

Now the publisher might claim that this is a specialised book, with limited print runs. So what? If the book was cheaper, it would expand the potential audience. Especially because of Babbage's fame. Perhaps the publisher is aiming the book at university libraries and researchers who could buy this out of grant money.

Recently, I reviewed a book of Michael Faraday's letters that had many which were never published. That book was similarly priced. But in this case, the publisher presumably had to hire someone to do some research in amassing the letters. So greater costs were incurred.

But not here. For this book, per se, I would rank it 5 because of its historical significance. But because the publisher is asking far too much, I give it a rank of 2.