I bought this book on biofuels trusting Springer, which is indeed one of the great publishing companies, and researching the author, who has a lot of papers on biofuels. Generally I'm not satisfied for the following reasons:

This may be a hardcover book, but the binding is not good. The pages are glued to the spine instead of being stitched and then glued to the spine. This of course detracts from the life of the book. This kind of binding is unacceptable for a book at such high price aiming to scientists and engineers.

On the technical part, the book contains a lot of information on biofuels. However, the information seems to be unorganised and the sad thing is that a lot of excerpts are repeated throughout the text. For example, the last paragraph on page 164 is essentially repeated in the following paragraph (p.165). The same holds for the last two paragraphs on page 160. The repetition even extends to figures: Figs 3.1 and 8.2 (world production of ethanol and biodiesel, 1980-2007) are identical.

These repetitions should have been avoided and replaced by figures which would help explain other procedures which are unfortunatelly only verbally described in the text, such as the photochemical stage of photosynthesis described on page 47.

As a result the book appears to have been written rather hastily and lacks cohesion and flow. The reader should be skilled to fill-in any gaps.

If the purpose of the book was to present a collection of papers on biofuels, the aforementioned features could(?) be acceptable. However, the book addresses engineers and scientists and such features could have been avoided by a more careful editing of the book.

Considering the price, the book should have been improved further prior to its release. The only reason for the 2 stars is the information which can be obtained but at the cost of the reader's perspiration.

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