Guide of Scifir
Guide of books
Searching books of science
To search books of science, the first that you need to know is that there are very different kinds of books of science. The most important are the textbooks, which are big books, frequently of more than 1000 pages, that contain all the topics of the branch of science the deal about. Of this kinds of books you can find books about organic chemistry, cell biology, zoology, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, and every other branch of science. All branches of science are covered by some big book, at the present there’s no exception to this rule.
After the textbooks, there are the specialized books.
The textbooks and the specialiazed books are the two kinds of books you need to read to be expert on one or more branches of science. There are too the biographies, the critic books and the science fiction books.
The biographies teach the life of one or more scientists. They are very useful to read if that person has worked in a similar way as the way you are working, because you can learn then the mistakes and problems that the scientist has had, and learn then ways to avoid the same kinds of problems. Also, it’s interesting to know how the life has been related to research and to the normal topics of life, common to all human beings.
The critic books are books that do a critic to some area of science, to how research has been done, to the advantages and disadvantages the invention has had, etc, everything that can be criticized is being subject to debate in those books.
The science fiction books teach the fantasies of possible futures that can be real if some research areas improves and/or some inventions are done. They teach and allow to imagine how life is if in the civilization those inventions are real, and allow to think of the advantages and disadvantages of the inventions.
Searching books of literature
First, the word literature has two different uses at the present. One use is to mean all the important books, and the other use is all the important books related to culture. In this second meaning, then, are books of literature the novels, the theater and the poetry.
To search books of literature, mainly of the second meaning explained before, what you need to do is to search for the kind of literature you want. Usually the literature is classified by country, and then you can search for “russian literature”, “japanese literature”, “chinese literature”, “german literature”, etc, in order to have a good amount of novels and philosophies to read. You can also search by genre, for example, “fantastic literature”, “science-fiction literature”, “romantic literature”, etc.
Recommended science editorials
The recommended editorials to study science in a good amount of detail, not partially, are Mc Graw Hill, Wiley, Pearson and Springer. Excepting Springer, those editorials publish big books of science that cover a branch of science, like for example organic chemistry or cell biology, and explain all the concepts and topics related to that branch of science, updated to the knowledge currently present nowadays. Springer, instead, publishes concrete books of science, with a high level of detail regarding the an specific topic of a branch of science. Given those two descriptions, then, you should first read a big book of Mc Graw Hill, Wiler or Pearson first, and after that read books of Springer of the branch of science the big book you selected deals about. In this way you can learn deeply about a science subject.
Recommended non-scientific editorials
The non-scientific editorials related to your country, or to the country you want to search books on, are always known. Usually there are sall editorials not so widely known as the bigger editorials, but that are also easily found searching through the web the editorials you want to know of some particular country. Then, searching throw the web you can find all the editorials you need. Then, navigate through the website of each of those editorials to do a good list of books to read! There’s nothing more needed to do to be knowledgeable of the good books that are being published each year.
Magazines
Science magazines, among other magazines, are very good to read. You don’t need to always read the last issue of each magazine you want to follow, because there are a good amount of them! But read some, you’ll learn a lot of science, or about any oher subject you want to learn of. There are two kinds of science magazines: magazines of science that comment about the advances and the science-fiction, and magazines of scientific papers that publish the papers with the purpose of sharing experimental results of researches that have been in the laboratory.
Important science magazines are of science are New scientist, Nuts and Volts, Muy interesante.
Other important magazines to read sometimes deal about economy, about polytics, and about culture. For example, The Economist and Forbes teach a lot about economy, and in the same way you can find magazines about polytics and about culture, by searching related to some topic or country, because there are various of them.
ISBN
ISBN is the acronym of International Standard Book Number, it’s a standard used to give a unique identifier to each different book, that allows then to search each book by its ISBN. It has been created in 1970 with the ISO 2108, and updated in 2007. It’s composed of the following parts:
- A prefix of 978, since the updated version of 2007, previously it wasn’t.
- The country code or language of origin.
- The editor.
- The article number.
- The control digit.
The editor sometimes has more than one different number for the same editor. The control digit is an automatic calculation based on the previous digits, it’s used to check that the number has been written correctly. The control digit has a different calculation for the ISBN of 1970 and the ISBN of 2007.
If you want to publish a book and you want it to have his own ISBN number, the publication house will assign an ISBN number to it, you usually won’t need to do a lot of effort to have an ISBN number for your book if it’s accepted for publication.
Ebook file formats
epub
epub is the most common file formats for digital books, also called ebooks. epub is an acronym of electronic publication. It supports all kinds of books, including comic books and books with a good amount of math formulas. It has two major version: the version 2 (currently the version 2.0.1) and the version 3 (currently the version 3.3).
oeb
oeb was the previous file format for ebooks, mainly replaced by epub.
ebook readers
Use those file formats
Now you can create your own ebooks! If you have a book in mind, take profit of epub and oeb, and publish your own ebook.