We’re coming very close to releasing Math Girls! Today we submitted files to our printer, and once those are processed we will be combing through galley proofs to work out the final kinks. It should only be a matter of weeks before Math Girls is available through the major online sellers, by special order through book stores, and as an iPad app for those who have gone digital.
As a special treat to tide you over while you wait, we’re making the first two chapters available as a sample! We’re really happy with how Math Girls has turned out, and we hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed translating it. Please let us know what you think!
Download the sample PDF here: Math Girls Sample
これはすごい！！英語で勉強しようmath girl！
Are there any plans to release Math Girls in other digital formats, like .mobi or .epub? After all, not everyone has an iPad.
We would love to! The problem is that .mobi and .epub can’t display mathematical equations very well, so every bit of math in the book would need to be saved as a graphic. While doable (maybe, with a lot of pain), there’s still a bunch of problems: 1) the font in the graphics wouldn’t match the surrounding text, which is ugly; 2) the font for the equations couldn’t be resized, so if a reader changed the size of the surrounding text it would look really strange; 3) the file becomes huge, so our cost of distribution through Kindle (which increases with file size) would mean that we would have to charge way more than we want to for an ebook.
This isn’t an issue for the iPad app we’ll be releasing, as it will use PDF as its basis for presenting pages. PDF has its own problems (can’t reflow text on rotate, etc), but at least it lets us show pretty math.
Just a few months ago the new EPUB3 standard was announced. EPUB3 includes MathML, a markup language to display mathematical expressions. When the popular ebook readers start to support EPUB3 and MathML, I guarantee you that Math Girls will be one of the first books out there that takes advantage of those features. =)
Mmm, good points. Don’t suppose you could be convinced to sell a PDF version? That would solve the display problems, and it’s my preferred way to buy electronic books. (Not as common, alas, but a lot of programming books are available in that format.)
Selling PDFs was in our original proposal to the Japanese publishers, but we haven’t gotten permission to do that yet. If at some point we can get permission to do so we’d love to, but I have no idea if/when that will be possible.
Ah well; thanks for the response.
Out of curiosity is the cover for the sample going to be the final cover for the book? Or will we get something different between the hardcover and paperback?
The cover in the sample is actually the within-book title page (it will be black and white in the printed version, of course).
The cover art for the printed book, both hardcover and paperback, is very similar to what you can see on our “publications” page (http://bentobooks.com/publications/).
[...] link to download the app for free—it contains the same sample (the first two chapters) that is available here on our web site, and if you like what you see you can purchase the full version of the book as an in-app [...]