After much delay, the second edition of my book Computational Organic Chemistry has been sent off to the publisher! This edition is an update from the first, including many new examples of the major themes covered in the first edition. In addition there are some entirely new sections and chapters, extending the scope of the book into areas not mentioned in the first edition. There are also some new interviews of major players in the field. Comments from this blog where helpful in guiding my choices for what new materials to include in the book.
I suspect that editing of the book and making it all ready for print will take through the rest of the year. Later on this year I will discuss in the blog the new features of the book in some detail.
I intend to continue to blog on new papers through the publication of the second edition and beyond. So continue to monitor this blog for new papers and for information on where and when to purchase the second edition!
Raphael responded on 15 Jun 2013 at 10:25 pm #
Looking forward to read it
Henry Rzepa responded on 21 Jun 2013 at 12:58 am #
Steve,
Do you have any feedback (which you are prepared to share here!) on the uptake of the online version of the previous edition relative to eg outright purchases of the printed version? It seems readers, if subscribed to Wiley’s online service, can request one chapter at a time?
I ask because where I teach, the publisher of our currently recommended undergraduate teaching texts will be offering online versions (via Amazon and other online retailers) from this October. Although OUP is not doing this, other publishers of teaching texts often offer individual chapters for a few $. Other models include a license to the book for a specified period, between eg 3 months and eg 2 years. With these various models, the idea of lifetime ownership has gone.
Where do you think your new edition will position itself? All of the above?
Henry Rzepa responded on 21 Jun 2013 at 1:07 am #
On the theme of where “text” books are going, I cannot help but notice that the price of your books is in the conventional domain reserved for what might be described as specialist books, ie relatively high price and (presumably) relatively low expected volume of sales.
Juxtapose this onto the model of book retailing that Steve Jobs introduced shortly before his death, of the inverse, ie very low price (< $9.99) and presumably much higher volume. My point is that at the price point of the conventional specialist chemistry text, very few people will either impulse buy, or one may presume that few younger chemists will purchase unless it is absolutely central to what they are doing (i.e PhD in computational organic chemistry). I guess the simple math of eg reducing the price point by a factor of ten, and increasing sales by a similar factor may be naive. So to might the assumption that the status quo, ie publisher gets >80% of the income and the author gets < 20%, is going to healthily sustain into the future. Lets face it, if distribution costs of kgs of paper are factored out, the equations might be presumed to change?
Henry Rzepa responded on 24 Jun 2013 at 7:17 am #
Steve, you write “I suspect that editing of the book and making it all ready for print will take through the rest of the year. Later on this year I will discuss in the blog the new features of the book in some detail“. One feature currently unique to your blog is the inclusion of data to support any post. For many of the posts, one can click on your static diagrams to reveal a data-rich 3D model underneath. With the conventional published book of course, you cannot do this. Indeed, since many of the posts (in fact all of them?) have appeared SINCE you published the first edition of thebook, I presume the next edition will be an opportunity to include all this latest stuff. So its a bit of an irony that whilst the blog is free (at point of use), if the same chemistry appears in the next edition of the printed book, that information will not only be lost there, but the reader will have to pay rather more for (forgive the expression) less.
Its a tough one this. Is the reason for the continuing existence of the printed book (in a format that has not changed for in effect 100s of years) really just because of the conservative nature of most readers? Or because it forces you the author to put a year’s worth of detail and attention into it (as you note above), and that in effect the readers purchasing the printed book are paying a premium for that level of quality and detail (and thus of your time taken in adding it), time which perhaps the production of a (free) blog could not justify?
Henry Rzepa responded on 24 Jun 2013 at 8:33 am #
Apologies for the deluge regarding this particular post. One prominent difference between this blog and the associated book(s) is that the former has comments, such as this one. Books, by the nature of their technology, do not. Some of the posts here have attracted quite a few comments, sometimes by the authors of the original article which you have commented on here. I guess that the blog can provide several opinions about any particular theme, whilst a printed books is clearly restricted to its author’s opinions (and any others he/she may choose to quote). However, that book might be expected to survive for a very long time (even if only in a library somewhere), but the assumption is that a blog is a creature only of its moment in time.
So Steve, I am intrigued about how/whether the substance of any of the 100s of comments that your blog has attracted over the years will manifest in the printed book when it comes out.
Steven Bachrach responded on 24 Jun 2013 at 10:26 am #
Well, Henry has certainly raised a whole slew of issues! I won’t address them all but here is my view on some of them.
1) The book will be available in both physical and electronic form. I don’t know if it will be available on a per chapter basis, but I will try to get that information.
2) I really did struggle, both before the first edition and before deciding on the second edition, if a physical book was the right way to proceed. I do think that there is still some value to the traditional publication model – the vetting of the book and author by the publisher (who in this case solicited a number of external reviewers), the attention to detail that writing the “book” brought out in me, the copyediting, the permanence of the book, the established distribution network, etc. I am concerned about the pricing of the book, but I believe that there is real value to the book, and I hope that the value the second edition brings will be apparent to all, including those that already purchase the first edition.
3) You are correct that the web provides some extremely useful features centered on data that is absolutely lost in the physical version of the book. I intend to try to capture some of that by the use of the supporting web site. But as you note, the comments section that so enhance this blog will not be available in a similar way with the physical book. That is a loss and I am not quite sure how that can be well addressed.
4) With regards to how the comments were translated into the second edition, I believe that I do call out a couple of them in the text – but really their major influence was more subtle in affecting the ways that I think about computational chemistry.