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Not new, but previously veeery expensive, now for most of us just expensive:
Volume 2
Volume 3

Available from Pemberly Books at GBP 70 each. Go to https://colorado..../search.pl and search for Diptera in title and 'Special Offer' under Status.

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Which are the families for volume 2 and 3?? Can I see a snapshot of some pages of this manual to get an idea? :)

Thanks!

70 GBP is still expensive. :(

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That is what I wrote. :P

I will see if I can make a scan of the family for each volume.

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where are the sheet scanned? :) ok. when you have some spare time, let us know some pages of those great volumes. ;)

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Thanks for reminding me. Hope to do it tonight.

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thanks, Paul! :)

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Contents of all four volumes in pdf format:
Volume 1
Volume 2
Volume 3
Appendix

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lol I would like to see the content not the index. With the index we have no idea about the type of content. :( How is the kind of text, the photos, etc etc. :) if it is possible, let us see some more pages. :)

But thanks, Paul. I appreciated your effort to scan/pass the manual.
It would be great to have ALL pages of manual in pdf files. :d lol

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Hello,



Whaou!! 200 pages on Chironomidae!

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and there are NO Conopidae pages?? ? A book about dipters that has no conopids is not worth. :P It is strange. The other synonymy is Stylogastridae..

I wonder if there is pdf version for this manual.
The manual is rather expensive. I can understand why.. but, it is an abuse! :P
I'm very curious about the way the authors put the content - how it appears in this manual. :)

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Apparently no specialist was available to write a good chapter.
(Probably) Not in your life time that a pdf will become available. As soon as copyrights are gone, then maybe.
If you have ever seen the Manual of Nearctic Diptera, it is similar.

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so, I must endure, at least more 100 years. Let's go! :)

I will try to seek for previews of "Manual of Nearctic Diptera".

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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.

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Gabor, you turn out it so clear and demystified the reasons about book's price! Yes. It would be great to have pdf chapters downloadable and, of course, with a cost - much less than the book ones. And, in this way, I think they would win much more money (they would reach to much more people), and no need publishing companies in the process. Much better, and they can update the information whenever they want as well!

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Gabor, I agree with you.
Internet is THE medium to make a manual like this more influential for professional and amateur dipterists.
For example, as in the Flora Iberica project
http://www.rjb.cs...milias.php

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wow. thanks, Carnota! A great resource! ;)

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The chapter on Tachinidae, as a PDF is
HERE