I'm glad people on here know what the author wants better than the author himself. You should all get in touch with him and tell him he doesn't actually want to sell his book, that he ACTUALLY just wants to give it away for free. I'm sure he'll be grateful to learn how he actually feels about his own book, since he's been wrong about it this whole time. :
And wtf is all all this "well, it's thousands, not millions" and "not even thousands, it's probably only hundreds of dollars!"? Money is money, stealing is stealing, and who are any of YOU to say whether that money matters to someone else? I'm glad you're well off enough that you can say "it's only like $300" or "it's only a few thousand dollars" and not care about it. Since $300 is no big deal, I'll give you my paypal address, and you can send me that $300 that is apparently completely worthless. Or better yet, SEND IT TO THE BOOK PUBLISHER! I love it, the money is so small that it obviously means nothing to him, but it's too much for you to ever pay for the book.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To be honest, I was really hoping for more from the people on the board than this, because honestly, I'm almost as much devil's advocate as really mad here. Did anyone really try searching for this book, in any way? If you had, you would have found several things. First, Google got permission from the publisher to display a preview of the book in their Google Book Search service. Turns out, in this case, the "preview" is a very large portion of the book. So if you want to read this, there is a perfectly legal, legitimate way for you to read most all of the text of the book, through Google. Then of course, there is your own library, where you may very well be able to check the book out, or request that your library get you a copy from another library (libraries trade books back and forth constantly). But no, instead of looking for the perfectly legal and legitimate ways of reading the book, everyone took a cop out and said "well, this is easy, and it's only money, so I'm just gonna do the easy thing and ignore the right/wrong of the situation".
Oh, and here's the copyright statement from the book:
http://books.google.com/books?printsec=copyright&dq=frank+trager+lasers&id=YOHJGz-9UNoC. Just in case there's any confusion: "This work may not be copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher...except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software...is forbidden." is the relevant part of the copyright statement. They don't really leave it up to interpretation, I'd say they're pretty clear, and that is their right, after all.
But I'm still not going to change your minds, so whatever. At this point, it's just funny that you can pretty much read most of it perfectly legally but several are still choosing to download it illegally instead.