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I once discussed briefly with Laszlo Papp the history of this book. He was quite sad that many people promised chapters but few delivered them on time. Originally the idea was to publish all families in two chapters. Eventually this was not possible for two reasons. First, there were no specialists available for a few families. Second, some people promised to write a chapter but failed to deliver one. Also many people were unable to keep the proposed schedule. The editors waited for a long time for the chapters, but decided to publish the ready ones and not wait for the missing ones. Eventually many of the chapters came in much later, and they were published as an appendix. So there is no real difference between the appendix and volumes 2 and 3.

Many people tend to think that the book is expensive, because the authors want to get rich. This is far from being true. Actually the authors did not get a lot of money, and several authors actually donated a lot of money for this work to be published. In addition a significant amount of research grant was put to the publishing process. Publishing such a thick book in so few copies is simply too expensive, most of the price of the volumes will get the publishing company richer.

My opinion is that it was a strategic mistake to publish this manual as a hard copy. The authors should have recognized the trends and should have published it as downloadable pdf files. Some (old) people do not recognize that publishing does not necessarily have to do something with a hard copy, rather it is an act of distributing knowledge. These people fear that publishing on the internet would be worthless, not realizing that peer review can operate also on the net, and this is the process that ensures quality, rather than the printing process.

In this form the vast knowledge would have been dispersed more efficiently, and ultimately this is the goal of an an enterprise like the Manual.

Generally I think that scientific material should not be published as a hard copy, because this will just increase the costs to both the authors and the interested parties, and makes the publishing company richer.