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posted by martyb on Sunday August 16 2015, @10:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the ten-hundred-words-should-be-enough-for-everyone dept.

XKCD cartoonist Randall Munroe will be publishing a new book in November, but it's already become Amazon's #1 best-seller in two "Science & Math" subcategories, for mechanics and scientific instruments. Inspired by a cartoon describing NASA's Saturn V rocket as "the up-goer V", Randall's created a large-format collection of blueprints describing datacenters, tectonic plates, and even the controls in an airplane cockpit — using only the thousand most common English words. "Since this book explains things, I've called it Thing Explainer," Randall writes on the XKCD blog, trying to mimic the humorously simple style of his book. Randall's previous book of scientific hypotheticals [What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions] — published nearly one year ago — is still Amazon's #1 best-selling book in their "Physics" category, ranking higher than Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time."


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Sunday August 16 2015, @10:38AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday August 16 2015, @10:38AM (#223490) Journal

    I guess Munroe's "What If" is understood by vastly more people than Hawking's "A Brief History of Time". Which makes it absolutely understandable that it also sells better.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 16 2015, @08:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 16 2015, @08:42PM (#223615)

    Of course A Brief History of Time is something like 25 years old. We'll have to wait 25 years to see if his book outshines most others in its category.