mathbabe

My book with Rachel Schutt is now available on Kindle. I’ve tested this by buying it myself from amazon.com and looking at it on my computer’s so-called cloud reader.

Here’s the good news. It is actually possible to do this, and it’s satisfying to see!

Here’s the bad news. The kindle reader doesn’t render latex well, or for that matter many of the various fonts we use for various reasons. The result is a pretty comical display of formatting inconsistency. In particular, whenever a formula comes up it might seem like we’re

screaming about it

and often the quoted passages come in

very very tiny indeed.

I hope it’s readable. If you prefer less comical formatting, the hard copy edition is coming out on October 22nd, next Tuesday.

Next, a word about the book’s ranking. Amazon has this very generous way of funneling down into categories sufficiently so that the ranking of a given book looks really high. So right now I can see this on the book’s page:

• #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Computers & Technology > Software

but for a while, before yesterday, it took a few more iterations of digging to get to single digits, so it was more like:

• #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Computers & Technology > Software > New Yorkers > Women nerd authors > one of whom is an occupier > & the other one grew up in New Jersey

But you, know, I’ll take what I can get to be #1! It’s all about metrics!!!

One last thing, which is that the full title is now “Doing Data Science: Straight Talk from the Frontline” and for the record, I wanted the full title to be something more like “Doing Data Science: the no bullshit approach” but for some reason I was overruled. Whatevs.