Catherine Housecroft: ‘Undergraduates do not want to buy big, heavy textbooks’

How did you get involved in writing textbooks?

I started working with a small publishing house before writing three Oxford chemistry primers on main group clusters, the heavier d-block metals and metal–metal bonded species. Pearson approached me to write a textbook on bioinorganic chemistry, but this was somewhat out of my field. I talked with my husband, Ed Constable, about the idea of writing a general chemistry textbook. That led to Chemistry, which is now in its fourth edition.

The publisher came back and asked me to rejuvenate a textbook on inorganic chemistry written by Alan Sharpe. When I was a student, textbooks were very dry. They contained very few diagrams, very few pictures and lots of text. I worked with the publisher on the understanding that I would basically start with a blank sheet of paper and would work with Alan Sharpe using his book as a starting point. Sharpe and I worked together to produce the first edition of a new Inorganic Chemistry.

Unfortunately, Sharpe passed away just after the third edition was published. I now continue to develop the book and it is currently in its sixth edition.

What has changed in Inorganic Chemistry through its editions?

The didactic approach has changed, but as an example of content, Alan Sharpe’s original book included a chapter on nuclear chemistry. It contained information about binding energies, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion and separation of isotopes. I did not think this was a core teaching area anymore, so the chapter was removed and topics incorporated into other chapters. There was no negative feedback.

The fourth edition introduced a chapter on nanomaterials. That chapter has expanded a lot to reflect research in, for example, new electronic devices such as organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) and dye-sensitised solar cells. Chemists being trained now need to know about these and other applications of inorganic materials to provide background for possible future careers.

I always try to change the further reading list and footnotes so that I have up to date research information. I am continually searching in mainstream journals to find relevant papers to update concepts or provide new examples. This is something I struggle with in the inorganic kinetics chapter, for example, because this is a topic that was studied in great depth when I was a student in the 1970s. This is a period when chemists developed basic rate equations and this really has not changed since.

What do you think about when putting together a new edition?

I think about the linguistics more than I did when I was working on the first edition. I had not considered the international audience that the book would reach. Many readers are non-English speakers, and I try to make the sentences shorter and make the language accessible to everybody.

In every edition, there are chapters that I should modernise or even remove. The publisher helps with this by sending out questionnaires to lecturers. Maybe I have 20 or so of these questionnaires to work with. I have a policy that if more than two people have said the same thing, then I feel it is important. These decisions are hard to make, but they have to be made to keep the book ahead of its competitors.

Photographs were not included in the early editions because the publisher did not provide the budget for this feature. As Inorganic Chemistry has become more successful, I have been able to incorporate more images. Unless you have a photograph or colour graphic to illustrate what you are describing, the textbook is very dry.

In the sixth edition, there is a short biography of any person who is mentioned – just four or five lines saying who they were, when they lived, what they did and whether they were awarded a Nobel prize.

What will the latest edition of Inorganic Chemistry look like?

There has been a change from undergraduates coming into the lecture room with a pad of paper and a pen to coming in with a tablet or laptop. Undergraduates do not want to buy big, heavy textbooks anymore. In addition to a traditional print copy, the new edition of Inorganic Chemistry has an entirely digital version to which students can buy access for a short period of time – for example, for a particular lecture course or exam season.

Moving digital has also allowed me to put rotatable structures into the book. I think it is hard for an undergraduate at first to be able to see in three dimensions. For example, instead of having a flat picture of an icosahedron for a B₁₂ unit, you now have one that rotates to get a better feel for it in three dimensions. I have also worked with the Cambridge Structural Database to link printed structures with their online database. There are also multiple choice self-test quizzes, which are less easy to incorporate into a print edition.

Catherine Housecroft is a professor emerita of chemistry at the University of Basel in Switzerland. She is the co-author of several textbooks, including Chemistry (Housecroft and Constable) and Inorganic Chemistry (Housecroft and Sharpe) and is the author of the sixth edition of Inorganic Chemistry. 

This article has been edited for content and clarity.