

XKCD’s web site is now touting its new upcoming book

Amazon’s discounting the newest book by XKCD cartoonist Randall Munroe by 36% — and it’s already become one of their best-selling books! What’s fascinating is the author’s previous book — published one year ago — is still Amazon’s #1 best-selling book in their “Physics” category , edging out Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. And now Randall’s new unpublished book is already Amazon’s #1 best-seller in their “Science & Math” subcategory for scientific instruments, and also #1 in Amazon’s Mechanics category.



For a shortcut to all of the author’s books, point your browser to this web page

The new book is called Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, and it normally retails for $24.95. But Amazon’s offering a special pre-order discount, selling it for just $15.99. It’s a beautiful collection of “large format” blueprints — 9″ x 13″ — offering the cartoonist’s wry, “detailed diagrams of interesting objects, along with explanations of what all the parts are and how they work,” according to a post on Randall’s XKCD blog. “The titles, labels, and descriptions are all written using only the thousand most common English words.

“Since this book explains things, I’ve called it Thing Explainer.”

Everything from datacenters to tectonic plates, and even all the controls in an airplane cockpit, will all get humorously simple descriptions. And in the blog post, Randall explains that he was inspired by his experience in trying to describe NASA’s Saturn V rocket (which carried 24 astronauts to the moon between 1968 and 1972). “Fire comes out here,” reads the bottom of the diagram, and Randall described the rocket’s control module as a “people box”. Another part of the diagram is labelled “part that flies around the other world and comes back home with the people in it and falls into the water…”

But best of all, Randall’s even describing this book in the same simple style that he’s using for its diagrams. (“I had a good time drawing Up Goer Five, so I decided to draw more pictures like that and make a book of them…”) It’d be a great, geeky gift — a 64-page masterpiece, released on November 24th, so it’ll be just in time for the big pre-December shopping season.

And yes, Amazon is also selling a collection of his popular XKCD comic strip – newly available in paperback format!

For a shortcut to the discounted book’s page, point your browser to this web pgae

