I’m pleased to announce that the Amazon Kindle version of my quantum computing book Dancing with Qubits is now available!
This book provides a comfortable and conversational introduction to quantum computing. I take you through the mathematics you need at a pace that allows you to understand not just “what” but also “why.” When we get to quantum computing, concepts like superposition and entanglement are shown to be natural ideas building on what we’ve already seen, and then illustrated via gates, circuits, and algorithms.
Throughout the book, I highlight important results, provide questions to answer, and give links to references where you can learn more. This allows the book to be used for self-study or as a textbook.
Important ideas like Quantum Volume are explained to give you a head start for reading more advanced texts and research papers. I provide many references to related content in math, physics, quantum computing, AI, and financial services. Dancing with Qubits concludes with questions for you to think about and ask experts so that you can gauge progress in the field over the next few years.
Features of the Kindle edition
- The text will get larger or smaller as you wish and you can change to a font that is comfortable for you to read.
- There are links throughout the book to other sections and the references in each chapter.
- Many of the references have links to external sources, such as arxiv or Nature for research papers.
- The content is in color, if your Kindle device supports it.
- You can search for terms throughout the book.
- I’ve maximized the number of mathematical expressions that are expressed textually (see below) to improve the reading experience.
The print version of Dancing with Qubits still has the full, rich mathematical formatting, albeit in black and white. In essence, whether you choose the print or Kindle version, the content is consistent and the formatting is the best I know how to produce for each medium.
Technical Notes
Here are a few comments about the production of the Kindle version, in case you are interested.
- The original content for Dancing with Qubits is in LaTeX. From that I can produce the black and white print version, a color PDF eBook, and an epub3 file from which the Amazon Kindle and several other MOBI eBook versions are created.
- I used make4ht and tex4ht to go from the LaTeX source files to HTML. While very powerful, the documentation is scarce and I spent many hours trying to figure how to make things work and then writing sed and Python scripts to fix things that were not quite right.
- I wrote Python scripts to create the various files needed for epub3, such as opf and navigation, and to break the 30,000+ line HTML file into smaller XHTML files. I used tidy several times to format the HTML and XHTML.
- The epub3 validators in several free epub3 editing apps either skipped problems entirely or gave false negatives. I found pagina EPUB-Checker to be the best software for validation.
- I wanted to maximize the amount of HTML formatting I could use and MathML is not available in a practical sense for all eBook formats. tex4ht produced very inconsistent results. So while I could express $x_2$ as x2 in the text without extra fonts, more two-dimensional objects like matrices had to be represented using images. I created macros to produce the right format based on what kind of document I was trying to produce.
- I used tikz/pgf and quantikz for the figures, especially the quantum circuit diagrams. I externalized the figures as JPEG images. It took quite a bit to figure out how to get them to be the right size for the Kindle version.
- Some math expressions in the book and chapter tables of contents have weird spacing if they involve subscripts or superscripts. This is an artifact of the Kindle software. This did not happen, for example, when I viewed the book in the Apple Books app.
