In The Great White North Posted January 29, 2012 Share Posted January 29, 2012 FYI, it's almost ready! Here's the link to the "straight from his word processor" draft: http://www.ttgnet.com/diy-bio/diy-bio-pdf-uncorrected.zip and here's the link to pre-order the actual book http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920017691.do He's particularly interested in feedback from home-schoolers on the first few narrative chapters, in case they've left anything out. It goes to the publishers on the 31st and the hardcopy is expected to be available in April. PS. No, I'm not getting a cut from this. I just really liked the chemistry book and can't wait for this one! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vida Winter Posted January 30, 2012 Share Posted January 30, 2012 Looks great, thank you for the links. :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeterPan Posted January 30, 2012 Share Posted January 30, 2012 (edited) Thank you, thank you, thank you!! BTW, does he happen to have a physics book planned next? Edited January 30, 2012 by OhElizabeth Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheHomeScientist Posted January 30, 2012 Share Posted January 30, 2012 BTW, does he happen to have a physics book planned next? I'd love to do Illustrated Guide to Home Physics Experiments, but (assuming we can get our publisher to agree) at the earliest it'd be a late 2013 or early 2014 title. Our next title will probably be Illustrated Guide to Home Forensics Experiments. We actually finished writing that one in late 2009, right as the financial crisis really started to bite and publishers started to pull back big-time. We're talking to our publishers right now about getting this one polished up and into print this year. It's by no means a sure thing, but we're hopeful. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeterPan Posted January 30, 2012 Share Posted January 30, 2012 Ooo marvelous! Are you offering an ebook version? Seems like you could do that until the publishing part can happen. I was confused by the ebook option at the linked site. When I clicked it, it said something about an expensive monthly subscription, blah blah. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matryoshka Posted January 30, 2012 Share Posted January 30, 2012 This looks awesome. And from the author's responses over on the s/o Evolution thread on the general board, it looks like it's not Creationist! Wow, homeschool science that's not Creationist. Can I just :hurray:. What would make this beyond awesome is if there were some kind of chart to line up the experiments with some of the more popular texts - like Campbell's Exploring Life and Concepts and Connections, and Miller/Levine.... Anything like that in the works?? (where's a wheedling emoticon??) :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheHomeScientist Posted January 30, 2012 Share Posted January 30, 2012 Ooo marvelous! Are you offering an ebook version? Seems like you could do that until the publishing part can happen. I was confused by the ebook option at the linked site. When I clicked it, it said something about an expensive monthly subscription, blah blah. Okay, this is going to sound odd to a lot of people, because it's so much different than what people are used to. We're publishing the book under a Creative Commons license. What that basically means is that anyone can download the book freely and do whatever they want with it--modify it, give copies to other people, and so on--as long as they don't do anything commercial with it, like sell it themselves, alone or as part of another product. What I've posted for download and is linked to in the OP is just the raw manuscript. Once O'Reilly/MAKE actually finishes the design/layout/production process, the book will be available for sale in printed form but it will also be freely downloadable. That sounds insane to a lot of people. Why would anyone buy a printed copy when they can download the book for free? Well, for pretty much the same reason people buy bottled water when tap water is free. In my experience and that of O'Reilly/MAKE, a book that is available for free download actually sells *more* printed copies than one that is not. A lot of people will buy the printed copy, both because it'll be pretty inexpensive (especially compared to traditional curriculum material) and because it's convenient to have a printed copy. Given the cost and effort involved in printing a copy versus just buying a printed copy, we don't expect many people to print it themselves. If they do, that's fine with us. The other thing about making the book freely copyable is that many homeschoolers are on tight budgets, and we'd rather they have access to the material without us earning anything from it than we would have them not have access to the material. We really want this book to be widely distributed and to become a standard for homeschoolers. If that means that nine people use a free copy for every one that buys a copy, that's fine with us. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheHomeScientist Posted January 30, 2012 Share Posted January 30, 2012 (edited) This looks awesome. And from the author's responses over on the s/o Evolution thread on the general board, it looks like it's not Creationist! Wow, homeschool science that's not Creationist. Can I just :hurray:. What would make this beyond awesome is if there were some kind of chart to line up the experiments with some of the more popular texts - like Campbell's Exploring Life and Concepts and Connections, and Miller/Levine.... Anything like that in the works?? (where's a wheedling emoticon??) :) Oh, yeah. We're entirely secular. The dedication to the book reads: "To Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882), the towering genius whose theory of evolution is the foundation of modern biology." As to the correlation, the OP suggested the same thing. Because these things change regularly, we decided to put a correlation page up on the web site so that we can update and add to it as necessary. Edited January 30, 2012 by TheHomeScientist Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elegantlion Posted January 30, 2012 Share Posted January 30, 2012 Okay, this is going to sound odd to a lot of people, because it's so much different than what people are used to. We really want this book to be widely distributed and to become a standard for homeschoolers. If that means that nine people use a free copy for every one that buys a copy, that's fine with us. Thank you, thank you, thank you! We homeschool on a budget, which is tighter than ever. I do invest in printed copies of books I can download for free. My son and I work best if we each have a copy of the materials. Often times it's more cost effective to buy one copy and use the download on the computer for the second copy. Then I only print the pages I need, but ds has the complete book for himself. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lmrich Posted January 30, 2012 Share Posted January 30, 2012 WOW! you are amazing. Thank you for making this free!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GailV Posted January 30, 2012 Share Posted January 30, 2012 Okay, this is going to sound odd to a lot of people, because it's so much different than what people are used to. We're publishing the book under a Creative Commons license. What that basically means is that anyone can download the book freely and do whatever they want with it--modify it, give copies to other people, and so on--as long as they don't do anything commercial with it, like sell it themselves, alone or as part of another product. What I've posted for download and is linked to in the OP is just the raw manuscript. Once O'Reilly/MAKE actually finishes the design/layout/production process, the book will be available for sale in printed form but it will also be freely downloadable. That sounds insane to a lot of people. Why would anyone buy a printed copy when they can download the book for free? Well, for pretty much the same reason people buy bottled water when tap water is free. In my experience and that of O'Reilly/MAKE, a book that is available for free download actually sells *more* printed copies than one that is not. A lot of people will buy the printed copy, both because it'll be pretty inexpensive (especially compared to traditional curriculum material) and because it's convenient to have a printed copy. Given the cost and effort involved in printing a copy versus just buying a printed copy, we don't expect many people to print it themselves. If they do, that's fine with us. The other thing about making the book freely copyable is that many homeschoolers are on tight budgets, and we'd rather they have access to the material without us earning anything from it than we would have them not have access to the material. We really want this book to be widely distributed and to become a standard for homeschoolers. If that means that nine people use a free copy for every one that buys a copy, that's fine with us. This makes total sense to me. ACS does this same thing with their elementary and middle school unit studies (the elementary is called Inquiry in Action; I forget the name of the middle school). I have it downloaded on my iPad, but, really, that print copy is sooooo tempting -- just having everything all laid out on paper, all bound up and ready for me to use (especially when dh then wanders off with my iPad, aargh). The only thing stopping me is that I don't actually have anyone in that age range; I'm just using it for a free co-op class for some younger kids. So I'll muddle through for free. And maybe go ahead and purchase the middle school one for use with my dd, because now that I've worked with the Inquiry in Action so much I really have a feel for the value of using the their stuff in my own home. Even if I don't use every single page of a purchased copy of the 2nd program, I'll feel like a got a bargain on average between the 2 programs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joules Posted January 31, 2012 Share Posted January 31, 2012 Okay, this is going to sound odd to a lot of people, because it's so much different than what people are used to. We really want this book to be widely distributed and to become a standard for homeschoolers. If that means that nine people use a free copy for every one that buys a copy, that's fine with us. Thank you for being so generous! The book looks great, though I haven't had the time to sit down and read it fully. I was hoping there would be an e-book version because I want to print the question pages for ds to fill in for his notebook. BTW, I've already pre-ordered the book from Amazon :D He will definitely want a real book copy to sit and read, but it's great that I can print parts as needed from an e-book for no additional charge! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vida Winter Posted January 31, 2012 Share Posted January 31, 2012 I also pre-ordered from Amazon. :thumbup: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheHomeScientist Posted February 7, 2012 Share Posted February 7, 2012 Thanks to everyone who made comments and suggestions. The book is now in the hands of the production folks, and is scheduled to be released on 22 April 2012. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vida Winter Posted February 7, 2012 Share Posted February 7, 2012 Thanks to everyone who made comments and suggestions. The book is now in the hands of the production folks, and is scheduled to be released on 22 April 2012. Looking forward to it. Will you be selling chemical kits? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stripe Posted February 7, 2012 Share Posted February 7, 2012 Is The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments also downloadable?? This is great! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheHomeScientist Posted February 7, 2012 Share Posted February 7, 2012 Looking forward to it. Will you be selling chemical kits? Yes, by the time the book is available we'll be offering kits customized to the book that contain pretty much all the things you'll need other than a microscope, prepared slides, and common household items. Of course, the kits aren't required to use the book. You can purchase the items you need from Home Science Tools or another vendor. Unfortunately, hazardous materials shipping regulations mean we'll only be able to ship biology kits to the 50 US states. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheHomeScientist Posted February 7, 2012 Share Posted February 7, 2012 Is The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments also downloadable?? This is great! At this point, the full book isn't downloadable, but we have created what amounts to a subset of it that contains only first-year material (versus first-year + second-year material in the printed book). You can download that book in PDF form freely from this link. http://www.thehomescientist.com/kits/CK01/ck01-main.html Just click on "Download Manual" at the top of the page. If our publisher agrees to it, we plan to do a second edition of Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments starting late this year with planned availability in 2013. That book will be like the biology book--licensed under a Creative Commons license and freely downloadable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StephanieZ Posted February 8, 2012 Share Posted February 8, 2012 Wow! That sure looks very exciting!! :) :) :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StephanieZ Posted February 8, 2012 Share Posted February 8, 2012 Yes, by the time the book is available we'll be offering kits customized to the book that contain pretty much all the things you'll need other than a microscope, prepared slides, and common household items. Of course, the kits aren't required to use the book. You can purchase the items you need from Home Science Tools or another vendor. Unfortunately, hazardous materials shipping regulations mean we'll only be able to ship biology kits to the 50 US states. :hurray: OK, so what is the scoop on how to utilize the book alongside a comprehensive reference/text? How much background/explanations/etc does your book itself provide, in your opinion? In general like to have a reference text to refer to for background, explanations, etc. Is there one (or more) that you think complements this book well? Or, do you think doing the Illustrated Guide "naked" would be more valuable? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheHomeScientist Posted February 8, 2012 Share Posted February 8, 2012 :hurray: OK, so what is the scoop on how to utilize the book alongside a comprehensive reference/text? How much background/explanations/etc does your book itself provide, in your opinion? In general like to have a reference text to refer to for background, explanations, etc. Is there one (or more) that you think complements this book well? Or, do you think doing the Illustrated Guide "naked" would be more valuable? I'm sure a lot of people will end up doing the book "naked", but it's really intended to be used in conjunction with a standard first-year biology textbook. The book coordinates well with Miller-Levine Biology and the free CK-12 Biology, which are the two texts we recommend, but it's easy enough to coordinate with any of the common homeschool biology textbooks, secular or religious. Biology is so broad and so deep that by necessity we had to pick and choose which topics to cover. A student could spend all day every day all year long on biology and still just begin to scratch the surface. Accordingly, whichever text you use, there will certainly be subjects for which there's no lab session in our book. Conversely, there will likely be lab sessions in our book that cover material that's only touched on in the text. There are about three dozen lab sessions in our book, each of which has background material ranging from a page or so up to several pages. We tried to make that background material adequate for someone to do the lab session without preliminary reading from a textbook, but students will always get more benefit from a lab session if they've read and understood detailed background material before doing a lab session. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StephanieZ Posted February 10, 2012 Share Posted February 10, 2012 Awespme!! Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
freerange Posted February 10, 2012 Share Posted February 10, 2012 Sounds like this might be a good supplement to our igcse studies! And I reported the spam.:glare: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheHomeScientist Posted March 22, 2012 Share Posted March 22, 2012 I'll probably get our publisher and Amazon mad at me for mentioning this, but I just got email from our editor saying that O'Reilly/MAKE has decided to boost the cover price of Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments from $29.99 to $34.99. Right now, Amazon is showing the book at $29.99 list price and accepting pre-orders for it for $19.79. To the best of my knowledge, Amazon will honor pre-order at that price even if the publisher subsequently increases the list price. However, I expect Amazon to increase that price for new pre-orders as soon as O'Reilly/MAKE notifies them of the increase in list price, which could be very soon. If you intend to order the book, you can get it at the lower price by pre-ordering before Amazon finds out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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