I have a spare copy I could sell to Powell’s. They’re a large independent US bookstore and are based in my town. They’ll even ship internationally but are pretty expensive.
Looks like they have a copy of Nim in Action too: https://www.powells.com/book/nim-in-action-9781617293436
Let me know and I’ll drop off a copy.
For me, since publishing is my main business, I would suggest Amazon for both paperbacks + ebooks (kindle, etc). Less profit margin, far better exposure (and ease).
For flexibility, any MoR (Merchant of Record) type of service. I've personally used Paddle (https://www.paddle.com/) for the past 7-8 years and I cannot have been more satisfied.
And, as a sidenote, don't be afraid of copies being circulating freely, in download-for-free type of sites, etc. This is going to happen no matter what. And, after all, whether it's books or apps, it's always the same: the ones that will try to download your app/book for free/cracked, wouldn't buy it in the first place, even if they couldn't find it freely available.
Just my .2 cents. ;-)
and, no, it's not just for obscure, scientific publications; this tool is the one if you invest the time needed - especially being a programmer, and with the endless automation capabilities this can give you, it works wonders
LaTeX is a pretty bad tool and I will never use it ever again. And it's not my "opinion" that it is bad, its math notation throws away the structure of the formulas. It treats formulas as strings and not as trees.
Then, good for me that I have never published anything math-related! (nor do I have any similar plans) lol
Seriously now, professional typesetting is more than that. The point is how would sb go the InDesign/QuarkXpress way, but with all the automation that a programmer can benefit from.
(and, yes, I've tried my hand at "coding" in ID, but well...)
If there's any real answer to that, I'm all ears...
I'm the first person to totally underline how ugly this whole thing is. And the learning curve is even uglier.
All I'm saying is that, if you put A LOT of effort into it, and are willing to generate it via your own scripts (what I call "automation"), then the result can easily beat every amateur typesetter around.
But, "easy"? It's definitely not. Not even readable.
P.S. As some sort of trivia, it took me 3 whole months of studying (and experimenting-with) LaTeX, full-time, before I published the first book (non-math, non-scientific), some years ago. And now, looking back at it, I think it's horrible. So, long story short: give it like 4-5 years, and then yes, LaTeX will bear its fruits...
I made an exception and bought it via Amazon.
Recently I have been using https://lulu.com to print some PDFs I had for my personal convenience, and it's quite nice. They offer for book authors a service where you can sell your book in paper form too. Just give them the PDF and some details about the book itself and they'll print it and sell it for you.