Download The Universe

Doomsday Deflected

Planet Killers:  A Spine-Tingling Look at Near Earth Objects, Mass Extinctions, and the Controversial Science of Planetary Defense, by Tad Friend, Byliner Originals, 2011. ($0.99: iTunes, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google, Sony, Kobo)

            One of the joys of borrowing a stranger’s cabin comes from the serendipity of someone else’s taste in books.  Years ago, in a corner of the hills east of Lake Winnipesaukee, I picked up a Stephen King anthology.  I’ve long since forgotten most of what I read there, but King’s introduction stuck in my mind.  The novella, he wrote, (I paraphrase from battered memory) was not so much a literary form as a kind of writer’s banana republic, a treacherous, alien territory into which innocents pass, never to escape unscathed.  How and when to turn the plot; the number of characters one can develop; the pace; the amount of exposition the piece can tolerate – all these tasks shift as the writer moves from either the expansive canvas of a full book or the utter economy short stories demand.  And until you’ve actually entered into that strange country, Novella, King warned, you have no idea how twisted are its paths.

            Tad Friend dares such dangers in what amounts to a non-fiction novella, Planet Killers, published in the Byliner Originals series.    It tells of the threat posed by crud from space that could strike the earth, and of attempts by a few scientists and engineers to figure out how to dodge such bullets.  That'’s a fine premise, certainly, and of course anything that brings together dinosaurs, great balls of fire, and wild but plausible schemes with names like “gravity tractors” has got all the elements of a riveting read. 

There's a bit of a wobble right at the start, though, as Friend recalls a tequila-fueled milliennial New Year’s Eve spent waiting for sunrise on the Yucatan Peninsula before leaping, abruptly, to the scene  65 million years ago, when it was a skosh more exciting in those parts, what with the dinosaur-destoying asteroid splashing down just offshore. From that rather jolting beginning, we settle into a story built on two pillars: a character sketch of the always enjoyable Rusty Schweikart, the Apollo astronaut, as Friend reports, most likely to show up at a New Age conference; and a loose narrative of a two day meeting by a NASA advisory committee debating strategies for “planetary defense” – basically how to avoid getting whacked by a major earth-crossing asteroid in the future.

Those two threads unreel rather calmly, given that our spines are supposed to be tingled.  Schweickart and his co-conspirators fear that most decisions makers (and everyone else) are simply unaware of the existential threat posed by a major impact, and of the probabilities involved.  Friend detours briefly into a natural history of asteroids and impacts.  We get hints of the science involved – a mention of complex orbits; brief discussions of the technologies that might deflect really big rocks – that gravity tractor, for one, a spaceship that comes to rest close enough to a dangerous rock long enough before any predicted collision to permit the probe’s gravity to nudge the object onto a safe trajectory.  In his best set piece, Friend manages to get inside his hero’s head– capturing Schweickart’s evolution from fighter pilot to save-the-earth crusader, in a process that began on his untethered space walk, when he suddenly felt the fragility of “pale blue dot” below him.  Such anecdotes ornament Friend's reporting on the NASA committee deliberations, which culminate in a modest plan for planetary defense:  spend 3 billion dollars over the next decade; launch a new space telescope designed to detection of potentially dangerous asteroids, and test the most promising couple of non-nuclear deflection technologies. 

That recommendation comes as something of an anti-climax, but that’s par for the course for apocalyptic non-fiction, honestly told:  what can be done is often less thrilling than what may happen if we do nothing.  But the deeper disappointment with Planet Killers comes its own uncertainty about what it wants to be -- and that literary neurosis, in turn, derives from one of the less obvious challenges that come with writing into  e-media.

    That is: Planet Killers is an example of one of the two distinct species of works evolving in the midst of the e-book transformation.  The gaudier one comes with the application of computing to the text.  Think iPad apps, which allow creators to construct works that offer readers the ability to perform actions on and through the words and images of conventional tales.  See, for example, Deborah Blum’s review of The Elements, something of a type-specimen of the form.  From the scribbler’s point of view, app books also entail new models of working that move towards the ways movies are made, in which the writer is only one, and not always the central creative authority.

The other enabling e-technology preserves the author’s pride and power.  Digitization and the ‘net combine to provide plain e-texts with a new channel for publication and distribution of what remain conventional works made up of words and plain images.  The cost of such distribution is effectively zero – and while that’s so obvious it hardly bears noting, it still adds up to a genuinely new opportunity for writers. You may remember that dim, distant past of, say, six or seven years ago, when the length at which a writer could tell a story was fixed by the venue, a few thousand words for a magazine, many more for a book, with almost nothing possible in between.  If you wanted to treat a subject that might not sustain between hard covers, yet offered more richness than could fit into two-pages-plus-the-jump of a magazine…too bad.  

 Now?  The ‘net doesn’t care if it has to gulp down 5,000 words, 10,000, 25,000 -- whatever it takes to do justice to the material at hand. But there’s a catch.  A 15,000 word piece is not simply a magazine feature at three or four times the usual length.  It’s not a baby book either.  Rather, such works demand formal structures of their own, with particular demands of organization, of narrative depth, of pace, and so on.  Before you know it, you’ve drifted across the border that King warned about.  You’ve entered (non-fiction) Novella, and, if you are unwary, it’s terribly easy to wander down the wrong path.

            Which, by the long road home, brings us back to Planet Killers.  The problem?  There just isn’t that much there, there.  Stripped to its narrative scaffold, all you really get are three steps on a short journey:  the book begins with the threat of a big rock falling from the sky.  We learn that some folks are working on it, without gaining any real depth on what those characters actually did to come up with their ideas.  And then we are baldly told that there’s some agreement on an, incomplete response to the challenge. No great obstacles face any of Friend’s people; no event happens within the story that provides any sense of risk or danger; there are no ideas sufficiently developed within the text that yield some thrill, an Aha! that lingers for more than minutes after the last swipe across the screen.  In the end, Planet Hunters reads not like a work written to the length it told its author it needed to be, and much more like a magazine article blown up to the dignity of an independent e-text.

            Thus the fate of the unwary who venture into the Republic of Novella.  The rise of the e-text makes getting there a doddle.  Getting out, though? No easier than it’s ever been.  

Image:  August Müller, The Diary Entry, by 1885.

Tom Levenson writes books (most recently Newton and the Counterfeiter) and makes films, about science, its history, and whatever else catches his magpie's love of shiny bits.  His work has been honored by a Peabody, a National Academies Science Communication and an AAAS Science Journalism Award, among others.  By day he professes at MIT, where he directs the Graduate Program in Science Writing.

 

SMILE: The Astonishing Destructive Power of Positive Thinking

SMILE: The Astonishing Power of a Simple Act, by Ron Gutman. TED Books, 2011. Kindle /Nook / iBookstore

Reviewed by David Dobbs

Sometimes when I encounter writing I especially admire, I like to type it out. Say, Nabokov, in The Luzhin Defense, describing his heroine taking a bath amid marital confusion:

As she immersed herself in the bath she watched the tiny water bubbles gathering on her skin and on the sinking, porous sponge. Settling down up to the neck, she saw herself through the already slightly soapy water, her body thin and almost transparent, and when a knee came just barely out of the water, this round, glistening, pink island was somehow unexpected in its unmistakable corporeality.

I type such passages because it seems they might rub off. So when for some reason the passages I had highlighted in my Kindle version of the book under review here, SMILE: The Astonishing Powers of a Simple Act, did not carry from my reading device to my Amazon Kindle highlights web page, where normally I would be able to select and copy them, I frowned, because this malfunction meant that to show you any passages from this book I would have to re-type them, and I feared, dear reader, and still fear, that they might rub off. I will have to read a lot of Nabokov to make up for this. 

The problem begins with the beginning, where precisely 11% of this e-book, according to my Kindle, is devoted to setting up a punchline that the title has already shouted loud. The author, a Palo Alto entrepreneur named Ron Gutman, who truly does seem like a nice guy, opens by describing a bus ride he once took in Africa. The driver and all Gutman's fellow passengers greet glumly his foreign face, language, and clothing, then leave him sitting alone, isolated on the crowded bus. After a couple hours of this dusty bus ride, and many, many words, he springs his surprise:

I decided to try something different and do something entirely unexpected. It was time to pull out the special power I had learned and brought with me from my interactions with people I had met during my previous travels through Asia and India, when I had connected with people from other cultures who did not speak any of the languages that I do.

I smiled.

I smiled at everyone around me. I smiled indiscriminately, I smiled widely, I smiled continuously. Whether people looked at me or not, I smiled at them. Although no one responded to my smiles, I started to feel better.⁠

 

They do eventually respond, of course, and soon the whole bus is smiling. Thus this book is born:

In the heart of a foreign land, away from development and infrastructure, in a closed environment where I looked and felt like an outsider, stuck in a situation where it seemed I could not talk to or understand others, and in the midst of unusual tension that I could not understand or explain, I became aware of the hidden power of the smile⁠.

 

This smiling reveal may have worked on the bus, and it works, mostly, sort of, in Gutman’s 7-minute TED talk. It does not work on the page. As I seem to remember someone once saying rather cruelly of another writer I'll leave unnamed: What’s important is not new, and what’s new is not important.* And everything is repeated. 

Did you know, for instance, that people everywhere smile? This means smiling is universal. Even more amazing: Your smile not only makes the people you smile at feel better, it makes you feel better too. Also, on a separate page very nearby, even as smiling makes you feel better, it makes others feel better! Or did I say that? Anyway, smiling at people also makes them think that you are both more competent and more friendly than they would think otherwise — and, incredibly, your smile also makes them feel more friendly and competent. Plus better.

This can change things. Indeed, if you think about it, smiles have “incredible transformative powers.” Smiles “can dramatically and quickly change social situations, breaking down barriers while forming connections and fostering happiness.” They can also, even as soon as one paragraph later, “create rapport and a human connection.”

Gutman finds this all astonishing — although he usually says “amazing,” presumably to reserve “astonishing” for the book’s subtitle. He is explicitly amazed, in fact, 12 times. (Beware, authors, the power of the Kindle to count your crutch words.) Overall, I would say, what amazes him most is the smile's astonishing power to make things better. He remarks on this power to make things "better” at least 25 times. It excites him. So he exclaims! Alas, Kindle will not find and count exclamation points. Damn!

Mechanisms emerge. Smiling, Gutman tells us, sets up a feedback loop:

To glaze this donut, Gutman turns to science. He finds many studies but, apparently, few commas. Did you know, for instance, that “in two separate studies examining thousands of pictures taken from 1968 through 1993 and 1970 through 1999 researchers discovered that 55 percent to 60 percent of men and 80 percent of women smile in photos from pleasant public situations”? Me either.

Why do people smile so? Because “smiling makes us feel and look better, both to ourselves and to others.” It was about here that my frown began to turn to fury, for while Gutman had related this fact at least ten times already, I was only, my Kindle cruelly revealed, 62% of the way through the book, which was way too far and hardly far enough. Then, in case I’d forgotten this crucial message while checking my progress, he used the next sentence to tell me an eleventh time.

The glaze accrues. “Under certain conditions, when men see women smile at them they interpret that as a sign that the women think they are attractive.” I would never have guessed. Lest I resist this news, however, Gutman offers a study showing that a women who smiles at male patrons as she enters a bar will get hit on far more often than she would if she simply makes eye contact as she walks in — which to me seems a brave enough thing itself. Same goes in libraries, One researcher, in fact, “ended up marrying one of her test subjects who first approached her because of her smile!" Exclamation point his.

Scan studies too enter the picture, arriving as thin, obvious, inevitable, and alluring as a pharmaceutical sales rep at a doctor's office. One fMRI study, for instance — of 28 moms, which is only a few more than the number of times Gutman mentions this effect — showed that Mommy’s pleasure centers light up when Baby smiles. Other scan studies show that a single smile can bring the brain as much pleasure as 2000 chocolate bars or $25,000. Someone tell the chocolate people they're wildly underpricing. And for me, please hold the smile; I'll take the cash.

What can we do with this information? Gutman offers suggestions. Smile. Smile at strangers. Smile at yourself. Smile the first thing on waking. Smile when you’re skydiving. Smile while you’re giving natural childbirth. Offers one smiley devotee, “I smiled through my natural, drug-free labor and fully believe it transformed the whole experience. I recommend smiling to all women going through childbirth.” I would love to have seen this woman recommend that to my wife as she was being wheeled down the hall for a c-section after 40 hours of labor and 4 hours of pushing. In fact, to test the astonishing power of this recommendation, I just now read it aloud to my wife. Her reaction makes me long to see this woman offer her this advice even now. She wouldn't be smiling when she finished.

I don’t mean to be cruel. I’m actually fairly smiley myself. But this book, which as a TED book is supposed to be about "a powerful idea," is a fatty concoction of neuropop, adventure travel, self-help, California woo, and Palo Alto entrepreneurial gush. It pushes positive thinking across some mathematical warp zone that renders it negative. I suspect it would make even the father of positive thinking, Norman Vincent Peale, just fwow wight up.

But don’t take my word for it. I’ll give Gutman a chance to close the deal. Elipses are his:

So, whenever you want to look great, sociable, and competent, or whenever you want to reduce your stress or improve your marriage, or whenever you want to feel as if you’ve just had a huge stack of high-quality chocolate (without incurring the caloric cost) or as if you’ve just found $25,000 in the pocket of an old jacket you haven’t work for ages…. Or when you want to earn the trust of others so you can change the world for the better…. Or when you just want to help yourself and others around you live longer, healthier happier lives … SMILE.

 

At that I believe I did smile, or at least grimace with relief, for I had finally reached the end.

Roy Scheider's with me on this, by the way:

Thanks, Ed Yong, for the tip on the vid.

 

David Dobbs, the author of The Atavist e-book bestseller My Mother's Lover, writes on science, culture, and sports for publications including The Atlantic, The New York Times Magzine, National Geographic, and Slate. He blogs at WIRED  is now writing his fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion. 

The Germ Theory of Cancer

Controlling Cancer: A Powerful Plan for Taking On the World's Most Daunting Disease, by Paul Ewald. TED Books, 2012. (Kindle/Nook/ iBookstore)

There's an inescapability about cancer. It can feel more like fate than a disease. People who smoke can't help but wonder when a cell in their lungs will go rogue and produce a tumor. Living near a toxic dump gives people the sense that someone is playing Russian Roullette with their children, and sooner or later the bullet is going to fire. If you are a woman from a family of breast cancer victims, you can almost hear the clock ticking.

But we must not forget that some cancers are less like fate than they are like the flu. Take cervical cancer. It can't be blamed on bad genes or exposure to chemicals. It's caused by a virus. The human papillomavirus thrives by infecting epithelial cells. It disables their brakes, so that the cells grow faster than normal. To avoid being discovered by the immune system, HPV cloaks host cells so that they appear normal. Most people carry harmless strains of HPV. Your eyelashes are probably coated in them. They don't make the vast majority of their hosts sick because we strike a balance with the viruses. We are constantly shucking off the top layer of epithelial cells from our skin and other surfaces. Infected cells typically don't stick around long enough to cause us trouble. But every now and then, HPV will push a cell on the path to runaway growth and, ultimately, cancer.

Paul Ewald, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Louisville, thinks that we need to let this fact sink in. Most of the research on new cancer treatments goes into searching for ways to blast tumors. This is an expensive strategy that yields relatively little benefit, Ewald argues. Chemotherapy drugs can have awful side effects, and the cancer itself can adapt to the medicine through a nefarious form of natural selection. Mutations that make cancer cells more resistant to the chemotherapy take over the tumor. But if we could stop a significant chunk of cancers in the same way we battle viruses, the fight against cancer may have gotten a whole lot more promising.

In Controlling Cancer, Ewald argues that HPV is far from alone as a cancer-causing pathogen. He points to hepatitis viruses, which are known to cause liver cancer, and the bacteria Helicobacter pylori, which lives in the human stomach and can cause gastic cancer. It stands to reason, Ewald argues, that a lot of the pathogens that make us sick also push us towards cancer. For many viruses, bacteria, protozoans, and animal parasites, it pays to spur cells to replicate quickly and to evade the immune system.

If a lot of cancer is caused by infections, then we may be in a fortunate situation. We can save millions of lives with well-established measures. It doesn't take a miracle drug to block the transmission of hepatitis C, for example. Stopping people from using dirty needles will do just fine. Vaccinations could annihilate some kinds of cancer altogether.

It's a provocative idea, which is par for the course for Ewald. He's long been an advocate for putting medicine on a solid foundation of evolutionary biology. In the 1990s, for example, he came to fame for his ideas about domesticating infectious diseases. The deadliness of a parasite can evolve, and in some situations, it may pay for parasites to be milder instead of meaner. He went on to argue that many supposed chronic diseases--from heart disease to schizophrenia--are triggered by pathogens. Ewald's work has been mostly theoretical--extrapolating from what we know about evolution in general to diseases in particular. His ideas are tough to test, if only because our bodies are so complex. But they have certainly been influential, as scientists have developed better tools for detecting microbes in our bodies and probe their effects on us.

Controlling Cancer is one of the first works published by TED Books--an offshoot of the hugely popular TED talks. (Here's Paul Ewald's 2008 TED talk on domesticating disease.) TED talks are crisp, quick, emphatic, and not too heavy on scientific detail. Their books are, too. Controlling Cancer is a quick read, without any photographs, videos, or other ornaments found on other ebooks. It does include footnotes, where Ewald back up most of his points.

The citations are a good thing, but sometimes it's hard to tell when Ewald citing well-established cases of pathogens causing cancer and when he's only pointing to suggestive hints. The scientific literature is loaded with papers in which researchers describe tumors brimming with viruses. These associations could be evidence of viruses triggering cancer, or they could be evidence that tumors are good places for viruses to breed.

Ewald does point out that this ebook is just a precis of a longer book that's in the works. Controlling Cancer intrigues me enough that I look forward to Ewald making his case in full.

 

Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including A Planet of Viruses

[Image: Dividing lung cancer cell/NIH]

A Guided Tour of Hell

Into the Forbidden Zone: A Trip Through Hell and High Water in Post-Earthquake Japan, by William T. Vollmann. Byliner Originals, 2011. (Nook/Google Ebook/Sony eReader/iTunes bookstore/Kindle Single)

Reviewed by Maggie Koerth-Baker

On March 11, 2011, one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded ripped apart a swath of eastern Japan. About an hour later, a huge tsunami wave tore through the wreckage, leaving behind a trail of salinated sludge and a burgeoning nuclear disaster.

You know all of this already, of course. In fact, at this point, the narrative of what happened in Japan—what's still happening, really—has been repeated so many times that you might be tempted to think there's no reason to read yet another take on this situation.

But you should set those thoughts aside. At least, you should set them aside long enough to read William T. Vollmann's Into the Forbidden Zone, a 70-page narrative that tells the beautiful, heartbreaking story about the aftermath of the Tohoku Earthquake and highlights two of the key problems with the way this tragedy has been covered in the popular press.

Vollmann isn't a science journalist. In fact, he's primarily a novelist. If you're looking for a lot of technical details on the science of earthquake prediction, or the real risks of radiation exposure, he can't help you very much.

But, on the other hand, I think that's part of what makes this book so powerful. As someone immersed in the science of news, it's easy to lose track of what an event looks like from any other perspective. As an American, far removed from the actual event, it's easy to get so caught up in seismometers, early warning systems, and debates over nuclear energy—in other words, what could happen to us someday—that we forget about the people all this stuff really did happen to 11 months ago.

Vollmann's book brings the real story—how an earthquake, a tsunami, and a nuclear meltdown have affected the Japanese people—back to the forefront, where it ought to be.

Narrative and Neuroscience

Blindsight, by Chris Colin. The Atavist, 2011. (Kindle Single/ Atavist App / Nook / iBook)

Reviewed by Annalee Newitz

Blindsight is about what happens when narratives are interrupted, neurologically and socially. New York Times journalist Chris Colin offers a fascinating snapshot of the life-changing car accident of B-movie director Simon Lewis, whose biggest claim to fame (other than CHUD 2) was the comedy Look Who's Talking. After being hit by a van going over 70 mph, Lewis was left with one third of his right brain hemisphere shut down. But he survived, offering his doctors (and us) a stunning vista on what it feels like to live inside a very non-neurotypical brain.

Lewis spent years in recovery, living a kind of half-conscious existence in his parents' home, slowly learning to read, write, and make movies again. Despite his seemingly-miraculous return to Hollywood as a wannabe B-movie director, Lewis still thinks in ways that are almost impossible to imagine. He exists in a world of "flat time," where he remembers everything that's happened to him, but not in the correct order. He can't tell whether that meeting he had took place before or after lunch. It gives him, Colin says, a contemplative, peaceful outlook on life - one that's earned him speaking gigs at Deepak Chopra conferences, and attracted hundreds of thousands of people to his online lectures about consciousness.

More interesting than Lewis' experience of flat time, however, is his peculiar form of blindness. Though he can't consciously see anything in his left visual field, he can still -- unconsciously -- pick up the shapes and colors in that part of his vision. In one test, a doctor held up a piece of paper and Lewis couldn't see the paper but knew what color it was. He's been diagnosed with "blindsight," a condition in which brain injuries render a person blind - but with some cognitive loopholes that permit sight. In Lewis' case, the effect has been that he believes his mind is functioning on a subconscious level as much as it is on a conscious one. 

What does it feel like to live inside such a mind? That's been the focus of Lewis' work since teaching himself to read and write again -- he has plans to make a movie based on his unusual way of experiencing the world. Unfortunately his main insight appears to be similar to what you might read in a new age holistic health book. "He's come to regard [his perceptions] as a kind of sieve," Colin writes, "one that oddly inclines him toward more substantive perceptions and omits the frivolous." 

One yearns for Colin to provide a kind of scientific counterpoint to Lewis' subjective experiences, explaining what possible neurological mechanisms underly them. In the Atavist app version, we do get lengthy additional text that fills in some of this background, but it might have worked better in the main body of the text itself. That's ultimately the main flaw in this essay. We don't get the outside perspective that would place Lewis' story in a larger context. Still, it's well worth reading, especially for Colin's insight into what happens to a man whose life revolves around storytelling when he loses his ability to view and to plot the narrative of his own life.

A note on text vs. app: I originally read this essay as a Kindle Single, which had none of the multimedia features of the Atavist app. When I read the Atavist version, there were a few extras, such as the scientific footnotes and some photos, which were a welcome addition. But most of the extras, like maps of every place mentioned in the story and a "timeline" of Lewis' life, were unnecessary.  

Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9.com, and is currently writing a book about how we'll survive the next mass extinction.

The state of the eBook, early 2012

by John Timmer

It's easy to forget that it's only been five years since Sony and Amazon first started targeting consumers with dedicated eReading hardware. Over the past few years, the painfully slow eInk screens have gotten much faster, while the hardware itself received a touch interface, active color screens, and is now facing tough competition from tablets that let users do a whole lot more than read.  The rapid pace of change has pushed authors, publishers, and content distributors into a period of experimentation, compelling many to try new means of displaying and distributing their works.

Before we started looking at the results of some of that experimentation, we thought we'd step back and look at where things stand right now. What follows is a rough breakdown of the different forms book content is taking as tablets take off, and what those forms mean for authors and publishers.

Basic eBooks:  These are the equivalents of regular books in electronic form, typically the ePub, PDF, and Kindle formats.  These allow some basic control over formatting and chapters, but the format really doesn't add much over traditional forms of publication.  The biggest advantage of these books is that they can run on the widest range of devices, from the eInk screens of low-end Kindles to the active screen of the iPads.  That said, the experiences on these different devices aren't identical.  Complex diagrams, color images, and most photos don't display very well on the eInk screen, so the experience will be decidedly worse for anything that relies on those to get its message across. 

Supported devices:  Just about everything.  Desktops and laptops running the Mac OS and Windows.  All the existing tablets running Android and the iOS.  Dedicated eReader hardware from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony, and others.

Opportunity for innovation:  Limited.  Mostly, by limiting the costs (in time and money) involved in putting a book together, the basic eBooks make it much easier to publish shorter works and collections.  They also make self-publishing a viable option.

Staying power:  These formats are not going away.  They're perfectly fine for many purposes, and the device manufacturers that opted for eInk screens have a large base of book buyers to cater to.

Enhanced eBooks:  Think of these as an entire website in eBook form. Navigation can be non-linear, and it's easy to include video and audio content, zoomable images and diagrams, and other interactive media. Detailed color photos and diagrams can be displayed and zoomed.  These are not only a big step up from basic eBooks, but they're a big step up from books in general, providing a degree of interactivity that just isn't possible otherwise. All this makes things like science textbooks and children's literature a viable option.  

Like basic eBooks, however, the enhanced versions require stand-alone software for managing and displaying content—examples include The Atavist and  Apple's updated iBooks. It looks like Amazon and Barnes & Noble may have enhanced book viewing software on their tablets as well. Most of this software, however, is not cross-platform, so choosing one locks you in to a subset of the tablet market.

Supported devices:  Tablets running Android and the iOS. eInk screens simply can't handle multimedia, complex images, or interactivity.  

Opportunity for innovation:  Pretty high, since you can do so much more. But enhanced eBooks still need to be viewed on dedicated software, so they'll necessarily be limited to the features that software supports.

Staying power:  Each one of the software platforms mentioned above will have its own dedicated authoring system and display software. Most of these are tied to specific hardware. It's not likely that all of them will remain viable indefinitely.

Stand alone applications:  At the high end, the boundaries between a book and an application is getting very blurry.  It's possible to make a bundle that contains both the book content and the enhanced eBook viewing software, which can then be distributed as an application. But, for some content, the text is only part of a larger experience, which may involve detailed 3D renderings, user input, and other features that can only be provided by a bespoke application.

Opportunity for innovation:  Enormous. Anything that can be done on the tablet is an option.

Staying power:  Although a couple of the tablet platforms are on life support—WebOS and Blackberry—Android and the iOS look like they'll be here for a while.  Both platforms, however, are adding features at a high rate, so it's possible that some standalone apps will eventually become outdated.

Supported devices:  Tablets again, with apps being platform specific. For the Fire, iPad, and Nook, the manufacturer's approval is required to get your app on the platform.

Our reviews will cover material from all of these categories, although we'll shy away from content that's a straight translation of a print book to eBook form. For basic eBooks, we'll focus on the new formats and collections that electronic publishing has made viable. For everything else, we'll try to evaluate how the rich multimdia capabilities of tablets enhance (or, if it's the case, detract from) the reading experience. And we'll try to make sure that we look at the most innovative approaches to handling content we can find.

And that's where you can help us out. If you're aware of any science-focused eBooks that seem worth paying attention to, please let us know about them.

 

John Timmer spent 15 years doing scientific research before deciding he'd rather write about it. He's now the science editor of the technology news site  Ars Technica. He received a Kindle on the day Amazon first introduced them, and has been following eBook and eReader technology ever since.

A Cabinet of (Chemical) Curiosities

The Elements, by Theodore Gray, Touch Press Publishing, 2010 Itunes for Ipad

Reviewed by Deborah Blum

I hate to admit this but for some time - okay, almost the two years since it was published - I cherished an attitude about Theodore Gray's dazzling e-tribute to the Periodic Table, The Elements. It was too jazzy, I told myself, too flashy. Of course, what I meant was that it was so successful.

It's easy to maintain that envy about The Elements even today. As The Wall Street Journal noted in a recent story on e-publishing, this virtuoso exploration of our chemical world remains "a runaway best-seller", selling more than 250,000 electronic copies and generating more than $2.5 million in income for Touch Press publishing.

But I'd like to here to get past author envy and take a serious look at what makes this publication so exceptionally successful - and, in fact, so exceptional. I should say at this point that I am superficially acquainted with Theodore Gray - we've both been part of programs on communicating chemistry. And that one of his comments about communicating chemistry has stayed with me- the idea that we can reach people afraid of the subject by showing them that it can also be beautiful.

Because The Elements is, indeed, foremost a thing of beauty. It's actually the electronic version of Gray's 2009 printed coffee table book of the same title, both shimmering with gorgeous images: the versatile element carbon is illustrated by the bright glitter of diamonds, the radioactive element radium is shown through the eerie blue-green glow of a vintage watch dial.  But in the e-book version, these come playfully to virtual life. Some of the elements display in video; nitrogen as a flask swirling with an icy mist of the element in liquid form. Or the reader can set the still images spinning, the diamonds flashing, a vial of gold dust rotating front-label to back. The elements can even been seen in 3D if one purchases the special glasses (which I did not). And it includes an audio recording of Tom Lehrer's classic The Elements Song, which I have played so many times that I am now refusing to disclose the number.

In other words, it's game-like fun in a way that a coffee table book, even with same lovely photos by Gray's colleague, Nick Mann, cannot be.  And it's worth noting that the e-version is sold as an app rather than an e-book. When I decided to give in and download it, I searched fruitlessly through iBooks before discovering it instead in the App Store (On the Touch Press website, it's offered strictly as an iPad app and an iPhone app.) I settled for the iPad version.

So is it actually a book, you might ask, if it's not even sold in a book store, if it's available on a few limited devices? Isn't one of the great achievements of the print publishing era, the ability to share information universally rather than limit it to a select few? And is my ability to spin a virtual copper necklace in comparable to what I learn from reading about that element in straightforward text?  I think The Elements - and its undoubted success - raise all of those questions and more. And I think we're still figuring out the answers along with the future of the publishing business.

But let me briefly make a couple of other comparisons between this and its print version. Both do contain scientific data about each element (atomic number, weight, etc.) In the print book, of course, there's a treasure trove of this right there on the page. In the e-version, there's a compact summary but also much, much more through  clicking on the Wolfram Alpha logo. You'll see the logo in the toolbar at the lower right on the image of the Bismuth page I've shown above; it looks like a fancy red star. This represents one of the ongoing tradeoffs as we move away from print - there's less likelihood of casual acquisition of information. But if we do seek out the online data, it's likely to be more current and more detailed - Wolfram Alpha allows you to go beyond its own database through links to a host of additional scholarly sources.

 Obviously, in its app-like format, Gray's publication emphasizes the visuals over text. It's enticely easy to play with the virtual iodine-laced chewing gum package and skim over the accompanying paragraphs. And that's too bad because if you take the time,  the writing is terrific - funny, smart, knowledgeable, friendly.  In his introduction, Gray writes: "The earth, this iPad, your foot - everything tangible - is made of the elements. Your foot is made mostly of oxygen, with quite a bit of carbon joining it, giving structure to the organic molecules that define you as an example of a carbon-based life form. (And if you're not a carbon based life form: Welcome to Earth....)." There were times when I found the text even more fun than the virtual elements.

 Interestingly, Gray's sequel to this success is a print book,  Theodore Gray's Element Vault, which includes actual samples of elements, such as gold leaf, and replicas of classic documents from the history of chemistry.  In other words, there are still times when a reader wants to hold, touch, review the real thing.  But despite my reluctance to warm up to it, his e-book/app remains a wonderful package. It's no wonder that Gray was awarded the 2011 Grady-Stack award for communicating chemistry from the American Chemical Society - or that the publication has been such a phenomenol e-success. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm leaving to treat myself for another attack of author envy. Perhaps another 100 or so rounds of The Elements Song will help.

 

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-prize winning science writer and the author of five books, most recently the best-selling The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. She writes for publications ranging from Slate to Scientific American and blogs about chemistry and culture at Speakeasy Science. She is a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.