A corection to my previous note - The price I was quoted for educational insititutions was $350. The $600 cost was for non-educational customers. To justify the cost, I think that one needs to think of this material more as a video course than a textbook.

The pricing plan is different. The book is sold to a machine. The recommended no. of copies is 5 to 10 for a class of 25, not 25.

For more info, see point #. 13 on the book FAQ page: http://apm.iitm.ac.in/smlab/kramesh/Faq.html

Prof. K. Ramesh IIT Madras, India

The e-book has been developed as a labour of love with no intention on making money out of it. The book has taken five years to develope - almost ten times the effort of a normal book. I have tried many new ideas and the focus has been on - to what extent the multimedia can help one to teach it better. I have included a lot of experimental results - many experiments are commissioned exclusively for this!

In iMechnaica some have asked Mode-II isochromatics, how to get J-from Ansys etc. - you will find all that in that book.

I came to know of iMechanica only when Mr. Gururajan sent me a mail that he has posted about my book. It is nice of him to have done so.

I enjoyed looking at iMechanica as very pertinent discussion on various issues of Fracture is done - Keep up the spirit.

Pricing is a complex issue and the book is competetively prized for a book of this nature. It is difficult to appreciate it in the first go - As good researchers first find what the book is and then come to conclusions. The book is priced so low (yes it is!) because it is developed in India that too in an educational institution.

iMechanica also gives a lot of free download sites - good - unfortunately the current e-book is not free. You may decide to remove the reference to this book completely if you so wish.

Thanks for your patience

Dear Alan,

It is a shame; I did not know the price when I saw the book review. But, I did have a suspicion about the costs because they were not open about it on their pages! Even then, $600 is too... steep.

The price I was quoted for the fracture e-book was around $600 - ouch!

Thanks alot for this

Dear Biswajit,

I wrote to Prof. Ramesh; he says that there is no version that can be used with Linux/Mac, which, I think is unfortunate!

Dear Biswajit,

The book page lists the following things as system requirements:

Pentium 4 processor,
128 MB RAM, Windows Operating System (2000, XP), Internet Explorer 5+
with Flash Plugin Support.

However, if flash plugin support is all needed for the e-book, then probably firefox running on a Linux/Mac should be possible. Thus, I do not know why they mention Windows 2000 and XP.

Guru

Guru,

Do you know whether there's a version in the works for Linux/Mac users like me?