[sciencemadness]

This was a favorite book of mine as a child. It was one of the last books that I scanned and uploaded to sciencemadness.org. That's probably for the best, since I was still learning how to make good scans and PDFs with the early books.

When I first started scanning and uploading books, Google Books did not yet exist. The HathiTrust did not yet exist. Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders did exist, but their focus on perfect text transcription of non-technical writing did not really suit the books that I wanted to share.

I stopped scanning books because the world largely caught up and surpassed what I could do. Between HathiTrust, Library Genesis, and sci-hub, there has never been a better time for doing deep-dive reading from the comfort of one's own living room. But I'm proud that so many people have enjoyed my scan of this book over the years.

[ranger207]

You're the source of that PDF? I can't thank you enough for how much I appreciate that! You, plus Dr Clark of course, single-handedly sparked my interest in chemistry, which up until that point I'd considered a boring collection of facts to rote memorize. This book convinced me to take chemistry as my last undergrad lab rather an easier course, which really opened my eyes to the fascinating and complex physics going on down there. Thanks so much for your effort in spreading knowledge of the world!

[sciencemadness]

Wow, time flies. I scanned this book more than 12 years ago. Here's my original announcement on the Sciencemadness forum:

https://www.sciencemadness.org/whisper/viewthread.php?tid=24...

I'm glad that it was so inspirational for you! If this is the only thing you've ever seen from sciencemadness, you should also check out the other books in the library:

http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/index.html

It's kind of a grab-bag of old scanned texts that I compiled from random third party sources in the earlier days of the web plus those that I scanned personally.

Also see the Los Alamos Technical Reports collection if you might be interested in oddball chemistry, physics, and material science publications from America's premiere nuclear weapons laboratory:

http://www.sciencemadness.org/lanldocs.html

Like "Chemistry of Uranium and Plutonium" -- containing both theoretical and practical documentation for the handling, processing, and analysis of plutonium in the laboratory:

http://library.sciencemadness.org/lanl1_a/lib-www/la-pubs/00...

Or "Foundations of Radiation Hydrodynamics" if your role in a nuclear weapons complex is downstream from that of the chemists and metallurgists:

http://library.sciencemadness.org/lanl1_a/lib-www/books/0041...

[avmich]

So I assume fo "Ignition!" you did the OCR and then reading the text? The font set to Baskerville, and chemical formulas drawn as ASCII, with = and # as double and triple bonds - or there were better solutions?

People do translations of the book and it's usually highly appreciated by those who doesn't read English. Excellent book. The introduction by Asimov is also awesome.

[sciencemadness]

The OCR text beneath the page image is there to make it easier to search. I used ABBYY FineReader for the OCR process. I didn't do any manual reviewing or correcting of the automatically generated OCR text. I ran additional scripted tools of my own to optimize the PDF that I generated from FineReader for small file size.

[kragen]

I deeply appreciate your commitment to cultivating knowledge and wisdom despite the restrictions placed on them by the ignorant.

[RF_Savage]

Big thanks for scanning it and for the sciencemadness library!

[djmips]

Google Books exists but it often feels like a tease since so much content is not viewable.

[jacquesm]

Thank you, from another appreciative reader.

[jerryjerryjerry]

Wow, appreciated and upvoted!