'How To Lie With Charts' Released As E-Book

Online, February 22, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Jones's classic book about clarity and honesty in visual reporting was first published by Sybex in 1995, and it has become a kind of chartmaking bible for financial analysts, business presenters, and math students. It has been adopted as courseware by college-level academic institutions as a supplementary text for studies in statistics, visualization of mathematics, and business management.

According to LaPuerta marketing director David Drum, "We've wanted to publish an ebook version of this popular title for some time, but reproducing the illustrations can be a challenge in the formats that have 'reflowable' page appearance. Reflowable format is fine for plain-text books such as fiction and permits line lengths and text size to be adjusted to fit the size of the display screen and the user's preferences. However, this book is full of example charts and drawings - there are more than 300 illustrations. Reworking the layout to suit every type of device and reflow situation just isn't practical. In fact, I wouldn't know how to best show a technical book like this on an iPhone, for example. But the PDF format preserves the layout of the printed page, so the charts won't shift in relation to the text and clarity of presentation will be preserved. We know that students in particular love the portability and ease of access of electronic textbooks, and we're now able to offer How to Lie with Charts in a format supported by just about every make and model of device, including Apple iPad, Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, and Sony Reader, as well as desktop computers, notebooks, and tablets." (Note that some ebook readers require a third-party app to display PDF.)

Last year, LaPuerta released a companion DVD, "How to Lie with Charts - Advice for Investors and Analysts." LaPuerta intends to release a downloadable streaming version of the seminar soon through Amazon Video on Demand (VOD) for rental or for purchase.

"Streaming VOD should be available shortly," adds Drum. "Watch for our announcement. For the future, we're looking at other formats and delivery systems. Vook, which can combine ebook and video in a kind of multimedia mashup on readers like the iPad, is intriguing, especially for courseware. We want to be able to provide instructors with test banks, distance learning tools, and course customization software. And not just for How to Lie with Charts, but for other subjects, as well."

Several video clips from the DVD are available for viewing on YouTube: "Part 1: 3D Bars and Perspective" (2:20 min.), "Part 2: Golfers Lie with Statistics" (6:10 min.), "Part 3: Cartesian Coordinates and Mercator Mistakes" (7:32 min.), and "Part 4: Six Dumb Mistakes" (3:10 min.).