My first contribution to Download the Universe, our collaborative site that reviews ebooks on science, is now up. It's a review of Journey to the Exoplanets, a snazzy and fun iPad app from Scientific American. Teaser:
When I was your age, we didn't have any of these fancy hand-held portable ebook readers. We didn't have any such thing as extrasolar planets, either. Planets orbited the Sun, and books were printed on paper. And we liked it that way. I'm assuming here I was about your age in 1992 or maybe earlier, because that's when the world changed forever. Sony introduced a "portable" device called the Data Discman, arguably the first hand-held ebook reader. That same year, Alex Wolszczan and Dale Frail made the first discovery of extrasolar planets, orbiting a pulsar with the romantic name of PSR 1257+12. It's been a busy twenty years. Everyone and their dog is reading ebooks, and astronomers are discovering planets around other stars (exoplanets for short) by the bushelful -- 760 as of this writing, if we go by the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia. Which is why it seems perfectly appropriate that one of the first and snazziest ebooks devoted to science is Journey to the Exoplanets, written by Edward Bell and illustrated by Ron Miller.
