Free Textbook on Engineering Thermodynamics

22DcAf about 5 hours ago 21 commentsRead Article on thermodynamicsbook.com

FR version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

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Discussion (21 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

longemen3000•about 1 hour ago

Hello,

The textbook seems nice and clear. The only nitpick i have is that it should talk more about equations of state. I understand that it may not be the focus of the text, but mentioning the current state of equations of state (SAFTs, cubics, multiparameter) would help guide readers looking on how to generate their own steam tables for their fluid of interest, even if the advice is just "go use CoolProp"

On the other hand, i really like the ilustrations on turbomachinery, helps ground the theoretical content.

2DcAf•41 minutes ago

Thank you! To be honest I think there is not much there because when I started 17 years ago my technical skills were much shallower, plotting a diagram to visualize/compare two models would have been quite a lot of work. But if I can be frank, at undergraduate level playing with equations of state is not expected nor a requirement. I’m happy to just say "there are others and they all have some common things". I‘d much rather the students and I spend our energy wrapping our heads around say the concept of entropy and what it allows us to do. Regardless, I appreciate your comment muchly (and shall look up CoolProp tomorrow).

2DcAf•about 5 hours ago

Author here. Feel free to send questions of any kind.

tux3•about 3 hours ago

Love the price transparency, the obvious followup question is where the other ~85% of the pie goes when I buy a ~50€ paper book, if the author only earns a little under 15%?

I imagine printing will be about 2 to 5€, if it's not ultra cheap print on demand refuse. Is the rest all for publishers and Amazon dot com?

2DcAf•about 2 hours ago

Following up with actual numbers for the project, from Lulu, in Euros: List Price 43 Print cost 11 Distribution fees (read: Amazon, 50% of selling price): 21.5 Lulu share of profit : 2 Rest to author: 8,5

Because of the different prices on different locales in different currencies the actual share I receive averages 7€ (gross revenue before income tax, although in my case the yearly income is too small to trigger it where I live).

For books sold directly on Lulu List price 43 Print cost 11 Lulu share of profit: 6.5 Rest to author: 25.5

The mindset should not be "this is all that’s left for me", however: a book is many things at once and for better or for worse, Amazon creates a big part of it. Kevin kelly has some excellent advice at https://kk.org/thetechnium/everything-i-know-about-self-publ...

2DcAf•about 3 hours ago

Amazon takes the lion’s share, and then the rest of the pie looks very different depending on which route you go. Big publishers print in batches and have very low print/distribution costs. I ended up on the other end of the spectrum, self-publishing with Lulu (print-on-demand, so much higher costs). I wrote an article in French on exploring the economics of textbooks, from the open-source point of view, a few years back: https://framablog.org/2022/01/20/mais-ou-sont-les-livres-uni...

tux3•about 2 hours ago

Thanks, I enjoyed the article. I've bought a couple creative commons books (PDF and printed), both to have the physical artifact and to send gratitude to the author, in a form that unambiguously means something. I rarely see a pay-what-you-want option, but that would make sense to me. Buying a free PDF isn't really like buying an apple or a manufactured good, it feels more like buying music on Bandcamp. It costs nothing to copy a file, but I still want to send what I can.

Sadly I haven't been very satisfied with print on demand books. It can be serviceable for textbooks, it does make prints a lot more accessible, but the quality has been pretty disappointing for me. When I buy a POD I often end up reading the PDF instead, which seems a bit wasteful.

kergonath•about 2 hours ago

> I wrote an article in French on exploring the economics of textbooks, from the open-source point of view, a few years back

Thanks for that, it’s very informative. I contemplated publishing a book that way and never actually got that far into the planning phase. Do you think things have changed much since then?

WalterBright•about 3 hours ago

When selling a product through a reseller, the markup is around 80-100%. I was horrified by this in the 80s, but soon learned that the resellers would be out of business otherwise.

The reason resellers exist is they do the marketing, warehousing, shipping, customer service, etc.

RITESH1985•about 4 hours ago

Is it chemical engineering thermodynamics or the mechanical engineering one?

rationalist•about 3 hours ago

I suggest clicking on the link and easily discover for yourself.

ninalanyon•about 3 hours ago

A scan of contents list suggests that it is mostly about heat engines. No mention of chemistry. Chemical reactions are mentioned in passing in the text but with no detail. Also no obvious signs of much interest in conduction, convection, or radiation.

So it's fairly narrow focus, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

2DcAf•about 3 hours ago

Indeed! Truth be told, I think the book really is missing a chapter on refrigeration systems. I had to call it done at some point for my own sanity. Maybe someone will jump in and add one someday!

quibono•about 3 hours ago

Nice, I’ll definitely check this out. You might want to look at optimising the PDF, it’s sitting at 40MB right now.

2DcAf•about 3 hours ago

Thanks! I think most of the weight comes from the PNG diagrams, but I don’t actually know: I’ll put it on my to-do list to investigate, maybe there are some easy wins here.

maxerickson•about 2 hours ago

The ~750 pngs are about 15 megabytes. The 77 photographic images are 22 megabytes.

Somewhat a death of 1000 cuts.

I used https://www.xpdfreader.com/pdfimages-man.html to extract them and take a look.

2DcAf•about 1 hour ago

Thanks for that. At first glance, it looks like that is a good place to be, regarding images. I will still investigate when I find time.

freedomben•about 2 hours ago

Claude was able to optimize the hell out of one of mine, might be worth a try

lain98•about 3 hours ago

Engineering books are very expensive in my country. I want to give calculus a spin. Spivak is a hundred dollars.

owenpalmer•about 1 hour ago

All textbooks are free if you know where to look

ghaff•about 2 hours ago

Calculus hasn't changed a whole lot. There are probably better books for learning than I used in the 1970s, but I have to believe that you can find pretty decent older calculus texts for not a lot.