A printed ebook
In 2008, UCLouvain agreed to reduce my teaching load to let me concentrate on writing the open-source Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice ebook. Since then, this ebook has served as required textbook for basic networking courses at UCLouvain and at various universities. The ebook is completely open and available under a creative-commons license. This license enables anyone, including for-profit printing companies, to distribute and sell copies of the book. Honestly, I haven’t checked whether someone had decided to take the financial risk of printing copies of the book. With today’s print on demand solutions, the risk is very small.
While attending a Dagstuhl seminar on Encouraging Reproducibility in Scientific Research of the Internet, I visited their famous library, probably one of the best Computer Science libraries. I was delighted to see that they had bound copy of the first edition of Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice. This is the first time that I saw a copy of this book.
This printed version has been published by Textbook Equity.