Molecular Biology of the Cell, 5th Edition [Print Replica] Kindle Edition

[Update, September 2017: Just a caution here that there now seem to be two Kindle editions of the book available. The original "eTextbook / Print Replica Kindle Edition" which is like a PDF file of the actual printed book, and a new "Kindle Edition" which is *not* in Print Replica format. This latter new edition has a different ASIN and shows over 3,000 pages (page-turns on a Kindle device, not actual pages). Beware though, as it is not going to have the beautiful layout and typesetting of the original version. It IS readable on any Kindle device (not just those capable of displaying the Print Replica titles), and should allow increasing the font size to make the text more readable for those who find the full page images of the original book too small or difficult to manage. Personally I prefer the original eTextbook edition which is an exact reproduction of the printed book. In any case, be sure you're ordering the correct version (they currently seem to share the same price) and don't be bothered by the fact that the new Kindle version shows more "pages" and has a larger file size than the original eTextbook one.]

This review is based (mostly, see update at the end) on the Kindle edition of the book, which is a "Print Replica" edition which exactly matches the printed textbook (it's essentially like a PDF of the entire book). For textbooks, even the most valuable (like this one) that I love and plan to keep for a long time, I now much prefer electronic versions for many reasons, not the least of which is that it's easier to hold up and read a tablet than a seven pound tome. You can also zoom in on text and figures as needed, and the illustrations are almost all in "vector" form meaning they stay sharp and detailed as you zoom in. You can also search the complete text of the book, do electronic underlining, set bookmarks, etc.

Yes, the Kindle textbooks have DRM that restricts what you can do with it, but I find the Kindle restrictions less onerous than many, and in most cases they give you an option to "rent" textbooks for the duration of a class which might be as economic as buying a physical copy and then reselling it when you're done with it. But if you want complete freedom to resell what you buy, or maybe you just like the feeling of holding a real book in your hands, then the printed copy would probably be what you want. Note that I believe the physical version comes with a disc containing the movies and supplemental materials for the book (turns out it doesn't, see update below), but you can also find all of this free on the Garland Science web site if you buy an e-book version.

So with that out of the way let's talk about the book! There are basically two groups of people who are likely reading this. Either you've had this book assigned as the textbook for a class or you haven't. If this has been assigned as a textbook, first make sure you're looking at the correct edition. This sixth edition is very different from the fifth (the authors point out that five million scientific papers were written since the previous edition) and you might *not* get away with buying a cheaper used previous edition. If your class is going into enough depth that it needs this book over something like Essential Cell Biology, 4th Edition then chances are you really do need the correct edition. Also the sixth edition is brand new as of this writing, so make sure you're not being asked to get the previous (fifth) edition!

This is one of my favorite textbooks of all time. A really good textbook is designed to prepare students to be practitioners in a field, not just to try to keep bored students awake and hold their hands through a class they really wish they didn't have to take. This is a great textbook and it's THE book to get if you want to learn as much about cell biology as is possible from one volume. It's also now entirely fresh and up to date (as of 2014), something absolutely critical in a field like Biology which advances daily. Everything in here is fascinating. If you think this stuff is boring then I feel sorry for you :) Life is cells, and this is "everything we know about how cells work" so it's directly applicable to an understanding of every (known) form of life, from bacteria to you and me. Even if your class doesn't go down into the depths and fine details, this is a great book to have for later self-study if this stuff interests you. This can be a textbook you keep for years and refer to frequently.

This is also a surprisingly accessible work for those interested in learning about modern Biology on their own. If you're someone who is scientifically minded and wants to understand how life works, then most of what's in here is easily comprehensible and highly enjoyable. Unlike many fields, there aren't years of prerequisites needed to start the study of cutting-edge Biology. If this were Physics, you would need to have had ten years of math and boring low-level physics before you could ever hope to begin to understand things like quantum mechanics or the general theory of relativity. But there's no math requirement for understanding Biology (though it's starting to become more quantitative and newer fields like Physical Biology are growing rapidly). A little knowledge of concepts from Chemistry is helpful, but again very little of the discussion in this book is quantitative so there's generally nothing to calculate, no equations to solve, etc. Cell Biology is much closer to something like computer programming in terms of the mental aptitude needed to understand it. To get started I recommend reading chapter 1 thoroughly, then read chapter 2 but if your eyes start to glaze over then just skip the rest of chapter 2 for now (the chemistry, while obviously fundamental and critically important is not necessary to understand deeply in order to understand the rest of the book, just as you don't really need to understand voltages and transistors in order to learn to program a computer), and then read Chapter 3 thoroughly which is all about how proteins perform most of the work in the cell including acting as microprocessors, motors, pumps, etc. By that point you'll likely be hooked and you can go back and appreciate the rest of chapter 2 when you're ready for it.

So how does this Sixth edition compare too the Fifth? Well, first of all it has been seven years since the previous edition, which is nearly forever in the world of Biology, so just on that basis alone the new edition is going to be a big advance. In general the fundamentals are the same, but the fine details of understanding have advanced a great deal.

An ongoing problem for the authors is the incredible volume of knowledge that exists and the near infinite and subtle complexity of even the simplest cells. This means the book could easily be three times its current size, a pressure which the authors must find a way to resist if the book is to remain portable and affordable. In the fifth edition, the book exploded past its covers and the standard edition was forced to relegate the last five chapters to PDF supplements (a huge Reference Edition with over 1600 pages was available with all chapters printed, and the e-book versions include all chapters). This was not a popular decision as it meant that even after buying and lugging around a big expensive tome, you still didn't even have all the content printed.

The sixth edition now includes the entire content of the book, and there's no need for a "Reference" edition. This means however that even though the printed book has gotten slightly longer, they have had to shorten the effective size by about 250 pages! This has resulted in a lot of editing and a reduction in the number of figures. In some cases this means more effective and concise content, but in other places interesting material and in-depth discussion has been eliminated. Taking as an example chapter 4, Control of Gene Expression, the current edition has 79 figures where the previous edition had 115. Also the chapter on Sexual Reproduction has been eliminated entirely (you can download the fifth edition version of this chapter as a PDF, see the update below) though some of its material has been integrated into other parts of the book.

I cannot help but wonder if the authors have really made the right decision here. Choosing to reduce the (effective) size of the book by around 15% at a time when knowledge in the field is growing so rapidly seems rather limiting. I would personally have rather seen them embrace the idea that many of their readers will be using e-books where the length has no physical effect, or even consider breaking the book into two volumes as is often done in fields like the study of medicine. But in the end this is still intended to be a textbook, and many students will likely appreciate anything that reduces the number of pages they have to read :)

A lot of work has been done to clean up the design, and they have re-created many illustrations in a more consistent style. This edition uses a pleasant blue theme in comparison to the reddish-pink of the fifth edition. It has a cleaner look overall, and I think the changes in title/heading color are a definite improvement for on-screen reading. There are a few places where figures include small areas of white-on-lime-green text that I have to zoom in on to read, but generally the changes are improvements.

The content in general has been brought up to date with many sections extensively updated or re-written. Interestingly, as a sign that classic quantitative methods from Physics are starting to creep further into Biology, there's an extended section in chapter 8, Mathematical Analysis of Cell Functions, which gives some mathematical (ZOMG! some math in a Biology book!) treatment to things like gene product equilibrium and gene regulation and serves as a good introduction to the field of Physical Biology, which is another interesting way of approaching the study of life (if you find this interesting then I can also recommend Physical Biology of the Cell which I bought and have been enjoying).

Anyhow, MBoC gets all the stars as being one of those magical books that takes you deep into a whole new and fascinating world, one where you'll learn how each individual cell in your body has much more in common with a modern supercomputer than it does with that soggy old frog you dissected in high-school. The practice of modern cell biology is nothing less than hacking into alien computer systems (not designed by the mind of man) looking for technology we can appropriate or adapt to cure disease, reduce world hunger, produce clean cheap energy, and otherwise improve our lives.

An exciting book for exciting times.

G.

Update: I've now purchased a copy of the physical book as well, just because I like it so much. It's a six pound, 13 ounce tome that's two inches thick. It's hardbound, and has the same feel and quality as the Reference edition version of the fifth edition. Paper quality (thickness, brightness) are again similar to the fifth edition. It's definitely not as lap-crushing as the old Reference edition (that extra pound or so makes a big difference).

The physical book does NOT come with CD media for the supplemental movies and stuff, so you need to go to the Garland Science site to find them (under the Student tab you can search for the movie numbers from the book without needing to create an account, or you can create an account and add the book to it to make accessing things a little easier). The GS site still seems to be rolling out information on the new edition so at some point they may have a page/site dedicated to the book as they have for some other recent textbooks. They have also now added a downloadable PDF of "MBOC, Fifth Edition - Chapter 21: Sexual Reproduction: Meiosis, Germ Cells, and Fertilization" in the sixth edition downloads area. This chapter got eliminated from the sixth edition (the meiosis section in the Cell Cycle chapter was extended a bit to compensate) so this is a useful reference to have.

Update 2: I just picked up the new version of Molecular Biology of the Cell 6E - The Problems Book and it's got many VERY nice improvements over its previous version. It should really be considered "part two" of the textbook. There's a huge amount of additional knowledge in here and it's great to just read, not just as a workbook. Go check it out.

This is not merely the best cell/molecular biology textbook, it is likely the best textbook ever produced. The style makes the subject easy to understand while still being informative; it almost reads like a novel. Each small section makes and then illustrates a specific point. This is reiterated by clear and helpful figures. It is not a book of just facts. The reader comes to understand what experiments and what evidence supports the current models. This helps students and professionals alike improve their own thinking. The book is ideal for both undergrad and grad/medical students but still very useful for professionals already established in the field. Each new edition provides appropriately updated information without 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater'.

I just purchased the loose leaf version of this text (in order to save about $50) with some trepidation. This version has the whole text and is 3-hole punched onto 8.5x11 paper. I'm delighted to discover that I am able to put it in standard 3-ring binders. Most importantly, I am now able to take a couple of chapters out and put them in a separate binder temporarily. This makes the huge lump that is a 1400+ page tome much easier to read because I don't have to have the entire weight of the book in my lap.

This is going to be a review of the Kindle version, and specifically the Kindle version on an (original) iPad.

As to the book itself, this is the best textbook I've ever seen and is just a must-possess item for anyone with the slightest interest in biology.

And, wonder of wonders, the Kindle version turns out to be a MUST HAVE even at the price.

The print version of MBotC comes in two editions, the regular version and the Reference Edition which includes an extra five printed chapters (they're available as free PDF downloads if you only have the regular edition). The description of the Kindle version suggests that it only contains the 1392 pages of the regular edition, which would be incredibly annoying because why should you have to separately download five PDFs as a supplement to an already electronic book?

But it turns out that the Kindle version DOES include the full 1600 pages of the Reference Edition with all 25 chapters! The cover graphic lacks the "Reference Edition" text, but all the pages are there, and the page numbers match up exactly with the printed Reference Edition. So immediately the price starts to look a lot better when you compare it to the Reference Edition.

But it gets better.

The book looks gorgeous! It looks *exactly* like the printed book, and a full screen page on an iPad is very readable even though it's a couple inches (diagonally) smaller than the actual book. One of my worries was whether it could look anything like as sharp and readable as the real book. Well, it looks *perfect*! In fact, most of the illustrations are actually vector-based, and remain perfectly sharp as you zoom in. This also means that the book will probably look INCREDIBLE on a retina-display iPad as the text and most graphics will be able to render at the higher resolution I would expect. Even the raster-based illustrations are included at a very high DPI such that they too look as sharp as in the printed edition.

What more could you want? Well, the book is fully searchable which adds tremendous value over the dead-tree version. Also of course it weighs nothing compared to something like nine pounds for the printed Reference Edition.

This is a book that justifies buying an iPad or Kindle Fire just on its own.

One of the best (not to mention heaviest) books ever becomes the best Kindle book ever.

NOTE! that you MUST have an iPad, Kindle Fire, or PC/Mac to view this book, you cannot even install it on a regular (eInk) Kindle because you need a big color screen to view it on.

G.