A free thermodynamics textbook
by Olivier Cleynen
I am delighted to release the textbook Engineering Thermodynamics today, completely free to download at thermodynamicsbook.com.
I translated this book from my French-language Thermodynamique de l’ingénieur which is simultaneously having its ten-year anniversary. Wow, ten years!
These books are not only completely free to download, but can be reused and remixed in all sorts of ways too, according to their Creative Commons license (the same as Wikipedia).
Also, in this era of AI slop, perhaps it is worth noting that they have been written 100% by a human (me). I did use ChatGPT a lot, to manage the sheer amount of work involved in the translation (110k words), and especially to internationalize the book, remaining aware of different sets of units, of vocabulary variations, etc. (Did you know that in South Asia an engineer would expect to measure pressure in kgf/m² instead of bars?) But in the end I have thoroughly reviewed every sentence, every word; it took 18 months on and off on my weekends, this book is mine and I’m proud of it.
I am putting these books out there because that’s my vision for a public interest internet. I am not sure if we can win against the oceans of AI-generated text and image soup that some people are pouring into it. (And they are using AI models that have used my book as training data!)
But hey I know that my 2015 French textbook is used in places where you are never going to see a University library or an Amazon delivery van. I look forward to that happening in English-speaking regions too. THAT is something that drives me.
Anyway, here’s to the next 10 years!
→→→ ENGINEERING THERMODYNAMICS