Feb 20 2013
SBM e-Books
[NEW POSTS JUST BELOW THIS POST]
I am happy to announce that Science-Based Medicine has published three e-Books:
Kindle | iBooks | Nook
Science-Based Medicine’s Guide to Miscellaneous CAM
Kindle | iBooks | Nook
Science-Based Medicine’s Guide to Homeopathy
Kindle | iBooks | Nook
These are the first in a series of 12 e-books that we will make available over the next few months. We also plan to update these books with regular volumes. The books are compilations of posts taken from the SBM blog, with introductions, organized by topic. They are a great way to take SBM with you, get caught up on your favorite topic, or to share SBM goodness with others. We are publishing them and making them available through a partnership with the James Randi Educational Foundation.
Purchasing these e-Books is therefore a great way to support the promotion of science in medicine through SBM and also the JREF.
All of the recurring authors you have come to know on SBM are represented in the books. I would also like to recognize and thank Mark Crislip who did the heavy lifting in editing and compiling these books. He is already working on the next volumes.
Now, on to the new SBM posts right below this little advertisement.
37 Responses to “SBM e-Books”
I hope a volume on acupuncture is to be included. I have hurt the feelings of friends – mostly Asian friends – who truly believe in acupuncture and have recommended it to me for various things including the prevention of colds (?!). I invariably decline on the grounds (always delivered respectfully) that there is simply no compelling evidence that it works. It would be useful to have a small volume that interested believers might read.
* * *
“Mark Crislip who did the heavy lifting in editing”
This is great! Having these at the ready will save a lot of time and printing to forward posts to people I’ve interacted with on these topics. I agree with Windriven that Acupuncture should be included–it’s the one that many among the somewhat skeptical are likely to have read positive things about and is appearing in credible places as part of “integrative medicine”.
Thank you Dr. Crislip for your work on this project. It’s very rewarding to see this step to move beyond the blog, something I’ve been hoping for from the beginning.
A book on acupuncture is coming.
Congratulations to Steve, Mark and Dave very creative and useful. My essay on energy medicine appears as one of the miscellaneous runts of the litter. ‘ Distance Healing’ is one of the contenders for ‘most foolishly spent money’ by a science agency—– using clinical trials to test a basic law of thermodynamics? Where did their grant officers study undergraduate physics and chemistry?
Cheers,
Eugenie Mielczarek
Hey. If the Pope can be an authority on birth control…
I hope the upcoming book on acupuncture doesn’t only discuss the TCM influenced acupuncture, but also other therapies / modalities using needles such as dry needling, which don’t involve the chi/qi framework or make any claims about mystical energies.
I Are they only in Kindle format for the US? Amazon won’t even let me access the sample, as I’m in the UK.
Thank you for this publication announcement and congratulations. This is welcome news. I know more than a few people who would like this kind of information but don’t trust blogs. Having things in e-book form will make it more accessible to them and many others.
One publishing question: why did you decided to unhypehate (un-hyphenate?) science-based medicine on the covers?
I appreciate you all taking the time to make these. I can’t wait to read them.
@Mark Crislip
All joking aside, editing is more than proofreading, and it’s much easier to find others’ errors than your own. Nor is typing ability (the cause of many errors and not to be confused with bad language skills) really crucial to good editing.
I’ll let you know if I’m still singing your praises after I read the books. I’m off to order at least one right now.
@Steven Novella
Glad to hear about acupuncture.
——-
I’ve given each of my six grandchildren a Nook over the last couple of years so I’m thinking of gifting these to their libraries–you can’t start too soon; they’ve been well-grounded, but I’d like to pass on some of the skills I’ve picked up here for spotting poorly done studies.
Finally! A post that is both full of good news and drama free.
By editing Steve means I read them, organized them and formatted them for ebooks. Content etc was left unchanged.
The entire series, btw, is
SBM Guide to Acupuncture and ‘Eastern’ Medicine
SBM Guide to Cancer and CAM
SBM Guide to Chiropractic
SBM Guide to Critical Thinking
SBM Guide to Ethics Law Politics and Media
SBM Guide to Herbs Supplements and Medications
SBM Guide to Homeopathy
SBM Guide to Miscellaneous CAM
SBM Guide to Naturopathy
SBM Guide to Quackademic Medicine
SBM Guide to Vaccines and Autism
Science Based Medicine: An Anthology
the last being a best of
all hyphen free.
someone has already read all 1300 pages of the vaccine book on amazon and given it one star. Evelyn Wood would be proud.
Think of it as a logo rather than text. There’s not anywhere pretty to set a hyphen, and given that they serve only to clarify meaning, and none is lost here, what’s the point? One may as well ask why the copy is in full caps.
On the other hand, the cap ‘B’ on “Based” right here is certainly a matter of legitimate editorial contention.
Mika, “dry needling” is usually associated with treating musculoskeletal pain, and there’s been little or no SBM content about that so far. I do cover the topic critically on my own website, SaveYourself.ca (here’s a good place to start: Trigger Point Doubts). There’s also a new scholarly blog with very SBM-ish priorities called The FM Perplex (http://www.fmperplex.com), and one of the posts there is particularly relevant and interesting and highly recommended: Travell, Simons and Cargo Cult Science.
Steve Salzberg has a post up recently at Forbes.com titled “Naturopathic Shenanigans in the Maryland Legislature” and I referenced the “SBM Guide to Naturopathy” in the comments.
Some interesting comments there [especially my own
].
-r.c.
“We also plan to update these books with regular volumes.”
Does this mean you’ll be adding books to the series regularly? Or does it mean you’ll be updating the content of the books regularly, even after they’ve been published?
how does someone with a simple mac get these? I dont’ have an iPad, a kindle or a nook, and I have middle aged eyes that don’t want to read all this on an iPhone
…I am but a simple skeptic (who really wants an iPad mini, but can’t justify it b/c of my simple Macbook air and simple iPhone 5)
Kindle reader is available on every platform: mac, PC etc
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=sr_1_1_acs_h_1?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200438360&qid=1361413153&sr=8-1-acs
for everything you need to know for mac
Can you be available in googlebooks?
The current volumes represent the first 2.5 years of the blog. Every couple of years the volumes will be updated with the subsequent essays. And no, the upgrades will likely not be free.
@lsimons
I think you simply click on the simple ibooks, as I did with my simple MacBook Air.
@M. Crislip
Eek! Shouldn’t the obvious errors have been corrected?–I’m giving these to my grandchildren!
@PaulIngraham
Thanks for the links. I read them through and I have to say, my understanding of trigger points diagnostics seem to differ somewhat from what you describe in your article. Browsing through your site I also found your long article about sciatica and I have to say … I’m not too impressed with it. Perhaps it’s out of date, seeming to date from 2011, but I think you put *way* too much weight to piriformis syndrome (lots of massage therapists seem to, it’s almost nonexistent in reality) and myofascial causes (which you seem to somewhat discredit in other articles, hence my thinking that this might be outdated).
I now have made my Mac into a large screen Kindle and will turn it sideways when I read in bed. Hmm.
Dr. Crislip-are you no longer recording your quackcasts? I wasn’t sure where to write to you, but seeing as you peruse the comments, I hope you will comment on mine
?
@elburto
They are available on amazon.co.uk – in fact there are currently 6 there, the three mentioned in this blog post plus “Herbs, Supplements and Nutrition”, “Quackademic Medicine”, and “Vaccines…”. Just search for “science based medicine’s guide”.
Yes, I do the quackcasts, but not as often as I used to. It is a matter of time.
The Kindle reader doesn’t seem to be available for pre OS 10.6 Macs (I’m a 10.5.8). Am I mistaken?
Nope, 10.6+. You could try their cloud reader if you’re going to be someplace with a connection.
The complete guide to homeopathy:
It is utter nonsense.
The end.
Oh, Amazon is so much fun! I just left a review of the e-book based on reading this blog since it started. But for some reason it thinks I bought the e-book (I don’t mind if there was an actual file on my computer and they asked me to confirm the purchase). Well, at least I an fix it in edit once it appears.
Is there any plan to publish the books for other readers (Kobo, Sony)?
Nook books are only viewable on the Nook (or via apps), Kindle format is only on kindle (or apps) and itunes is only iOS.
Usually I don’t comment because I have very little to contribute, but I registered today especially to say thank you for this. Also, while I’m at it, thank you for the SBM blog. I read this blog regularly and I enjoy it immensely. I cannot thank you enough for your work. (I’ve also been a long-time listener of the SGU, and I adore it, too.)
Thank you very, very much.
Thank you so much for doing this.
I hear and obey.
I have just downloaded the vaccine-autism book and look forward to reviewing it.
Any plans to move this to the right column or maybe a banner-type ad rather than taking up the top fold of the website?
LOL! I’ve only been looking at the title and (rightly) assume you were pushing your e-books, but I was getting annoyed that you hadn’t written any new posts since this one. Without something to distinguish it from another article (or much larger text indicating to look below) I thought you were just getty lazy on us.
Now I have some serious catching up to do.
Any plans to release them on other ebook platforms? Amazon, ibooks and Nook all use proprietary DRM that prevents reading on other e-readers (presuming they have DRM – there generally isn’t a way to find out before buying); basically every other seller (Kobo, Sony, etc.) use a standard format and DRM that can be read on anything except a Kindle.
Yah, I no longer purchase DRMed material. Although most online music services have gone DRM-free, I had already switched to buying directly from the artist whenever possible. Bye-bye, iTunes store.
There are of course trivial ways around the DRM issue, but the wildly overbroad and technologically incoherent 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)* presumptively makes stripping DRM illegal.
* Is burning an iTunes-purchased album to CD or virtual drive and then returning it to the machine “circumvention”? (How does this differ from QTFairUse6?) Decompressing a downloaded software purchase “descrambling”? Only The Shadow knows.
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