![]() People still ask me, “What’s this book about, really?” And I tell them it really is about longitude-about the race to discover a means for determining position at sea, a challenge that stumped the wisest minds of the world for the better part of two centuries. Now that Longitude is available as an e-book, I enjoy continuing and widening the conversation via e-mail. Almost all of that early correspondence went back and forth by ordinary mail, and I wrote my part with a fountain pen. Many more people wrote to say they’d enjoyed reading the book, and quite a few asked questions the story had raised in their minds. (For example, the typesetter had inexplicably swapped the word latitude for longitude-and vice versa-on several pages.) Numerous attentive readers took the trouble to write to me to point out typos or other errors in the text, which the publisher then corrected in subsequent editions. ![]() The publication of Longitude taught me that a book can actually improve by virtue of being read. ![]()
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