08:49 – Amazon has a bunch of free mystery and thriller ebooks today and tomorrow, if you like that kind of thing. Kindle Review has some picks.
I’ve gone through all the lab sessions to figure out what exactly needs to be in the biology kits. There are 72 items. Well, 72 categories, I suppose. Half a dozen test tubes count as one item, for example. Now I need to generate purchase orders for the components we buy and run labels for and make up the stuff we package ourselves.
I’m also going to spend some time over the next few days running through the manuscript for Illustrated Guide to Home Forensics Experiments with an eye to rewriting it around a kit and adding some lab sessions that weren’t in the original manuscript. There were several lab sessions I left out of the manuscript because it would be too difficult or too expensive for readers to get the necessary materials, but I can solve that problem with a kit.
For example, there are special cross-section slides available that are metal with tiny holes in them. The idea is that you slide a thin metal wire through one of the holes and use it to pull a clump of fibers back through the hole. You then use a scalpel to trim the fibers flush with the top and bottom of the slide, allowing you to view a cross section of the fibers by transmitted light. The problem is, those slides cost a buck or two each, and are sold only in boxes of 100.
Similarly, there are several solutions needed that require only, say, 1 gram of a particular chemical to make up 25 mL of solution. That chemical may be readily available, but only in a 25 gram bottle that costs $25 plus shipping. Since many chemicals are needed, the costs can add up fast, and each reader would end up with lots of unused chemicals. But packaged in a kit, that solution may cost only two or three bucks, counting labor costs, bottle, and so on. That’s why designing the book around a kit opens up so many more possibilities.