Chemistry
This textbook covers all of the typical areas addressed in the (many) General Chemistry texts that are on the market. The layout is very similar to the one that we are currently using and the coverage in each subject area is equal to or better than our current text. There is an effective and highly functional (using embedded links in the pdf file) table of contents and index. There are also cross-links within the text to all of the Tables and Figures as well as to external sources, including the excellent PHeT simulations maintained by the University of Colorado. Nearly every section and subsection includes an example problem that is keyed to the material. This allows for ready integration of the quantitative and qualitative levels of understanding that is critical to success in General Chemistry.
The book is accurate and almost entirely free of typographical errors (we would presume that there would be few errors of substance in a subject as well-developed as General Chemistry). Some of the "real world" examples touch on areas that can be considered politically controversial (like Global Climate Science) but these are well done and stick to unimpeachable facts, so their accuracy is a strength of the text. To my eye, these sections are pretty neutral and unbiased. The majority of the content is comprehensively and accurately presented and there is little controversy in the presentation of the science behind General Chemistry, most of which is decades, if not centuries old. I have not carefully checked the veracity of the answers to the problems at the end of each chapter (of which there are a very good number) but I am a pretty good copy editor and I only found three typographical errors in the six chapters that I carefully read. This book therefore has less errors in it than all of the commercially produced editions that I have used in the last twenty years.
As I mentioned in the point above, the vast majority of the content in a General Chemistry textbook hasn't changed in decades and isn't likely to change much in the foreseeable future. The "real-world" examples and artwork are the things that I can see will need updating. As they currently exist, they are very topical and well-chosen and all show high relevance to the sections that they were placed in. There are a few examples of reuse of artwork of examples, but these are actually useful in showing the students the "connected-ness" of the material and to reinforce the concept of building a topic from fundamentals upward. The beauty of the open-access format is that updating these "extra" sections of the text will be relatively painless and I could even imagine a user-forum where students or faculty could submit their own contributions to the list of connections and relevant examples. I also expect that the use of video (instead of stills) within the chapters will continue to become seamless, allowing much more accessible illustrations of the material. Obviously these types of things will never be easy to implement in a hardcopy text.
The text is easy to read and is careful to explain the first (and in some cases repeated) occurrence of necessary jargon, which a study of Chemistry is obliged to include. The sections are relatively short and avoid long explanations of the application of equations and other actionable concepts by including clear and relevant example problems. The explanation of the key concepts was as clear or clearer than that in the text we are currently using. The links to the external sources should significantly improve the students comprehension of the material, since it allows them to clearly visualize the material that is described in the text. All of the links that I followed connected cleanly and quickly to the targets, all of which were on-point to the material in that section.
Again, this is a bit of a given in General Chemistry texts, where there is broad agreement on the presentation of the content, including symbology, terminology, and algorithm. This book is both internally consistent in its treatment and externally consistent with the accepted approach (at least in the traditional sense, since the new atoms first approach represents a slightly different paradigm). I should note that each chapter also stands on its own allowing some freedom in choosing the order in which they are presented. At my institution, which is on quarters, we save Chapters 5, and 9 for the second term and then progress through to Chapter 13 in the rest of that quarter, and I see no problems in that order for the presentation in either of the first two terms.
The book is wonderfully modular with clearly encapsulated sub-sections, nearly all of which have example problems and related end of chapter homework. Almost every sub-section has an external link to help illustrate the material or a "real-world" example to improve the currency. We (faculty who teach General Chemistry) tend to follow the same rough order of presentation, as I noted above, but at my institution, we also use a POGIL workbook, which does not always align exactly with the order of topics in the text. I think it would be easy for faculty (or even students, who are not always used to using an index or table of contents) to identify the subsections (often referred to as modules in the text) that relate to a given POGIL assignment. None of the modules in any of the six chapters that I read carefully would require more than a half-hour of dedicated study time for the initial reading by an average student.
Again, this large scale organization of this book is similar to the large majority of General Chemistry textbooks on the market, so it is a bit of a given that this is the right way to do it. But as noted in the point above, the small scale organization of this text into small digestible modules, most of which incorporate relevant example problems and external links or examples is what makes it so readable. There are always difficult transitions and/or conceptual cul de sacs in the material in a General Chemistry class, but this text does a better job than many of easing those transitions and attempting to show how the material fits into the bigger picture.
I must confess that I only used the pdf version of the text (there is also an online reading tool and a hardcopy that can be printed and mailed to the student) but I did try it out on a computer, ipad mini, and older Blackberry device and it was quite usable on all three. The operating system on the Blackberry was old and out of date, so that was the only device where the links in the text didn't work properly. On both the ipad and my desktop and laptop, the links worked quickly and were never broken. The illustrations (tables and figures) were clear and faithfully displayed on all of the devices as is typical of the modern generation of adobe pdf files/readers. One real advantage of this reading mode is the access to the page thumbnails or bookmarks and the "last view" button that allow a reader to hop back and forth between the beginning and end of the book, chapter, etc. The one oddity that I did note is that some Example problems and other content would split between pages in the pdf, which most people would avoid during compile-time by inserting new pages. This was minimally distracting, but presumably easy to fix(?)
As noted above, I am a pretty decent copy editor and I detected few typos and no clear grammatical errors (being somewhat generous in attributing the source, I'll allow) in the text. In general the authors adopted a clear, concise style and tried to keep sentences short and simple.
It is difficult to make a dry subject like chemistry culturally inclusive (or even exclusive) but the authors did select both male and female scientists to highlight, which is appreciated. Some of the slightly politically touchy areas like the real-world connections to climate change science will probably cause some readers discomfort, but they are scientifically correct and uncontroversial in their limited conclusions. We aim to teach students the scientific method, so they should begin to grapple with areas where demonstrable facts are in contradictions to their previously held beliefs.
I was very pleasantly surprised in reading this book. It is a very high quality General Chemistry textbook and I think we will take a serious look at adopting it.