Six books about seismic interpretation

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Last autumn Brian Romans asked about books on seismic interpretation. It made me realize two things: (1) there are loads of them out there, and (2) I hadn't read any of them. (I don't know what sort of light this confession casts on me as a seismic interpreter, but let's put that to one side for now.)

Here are the books I know about, in no particular order. Have I missed any? Let us know in the comments!

Introduction to Seismic Interpretation

AAPG
Amazon.com
Google Books

Bruce Hart, 2011, AAPG Discovery Series 16. Tulsa, USA: AAPG. List price USD 42.

This 'book' is a CD-based e-book, aimed at the new interpreter. Bruce is an interpreter geologist, so there's plenty of seismic stratigraphy.

A Petroleum Geologist's Guide to Seismic Reflection

William Ashcroft, 2011. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. List price USD 90.

I really, really like this book. It covers all the important topics and is not afraid to get quantitative — and it comes with a CD containing data and software to play with. 

Interpretation of Three-Dimensional Seismic Data

Alistair Brown, AAPG Memoir. Tulsa, USA: AAPG. List price USD 115.

This book is big! Many people think of it as 'the' book on interpretation. The images are rather dated—the first edition was in 1986—but the advice is solid.

First Steps in Seismic Interpretation

SEG
Amazon.com
Google Books

Donald Herron, SEG. Tulsa, USA: SEG. List price USD 62.

This new book is tremendous, if a little pricey for its size. Don is a thoroughly geophysical interpreter with deep practical experience. A must-read for sub-salt pickers!

3D Seismic Interpretation

Bacon, Simm and Redshaw, 2003. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge. List price USD 80.

A nicely produced and comprehensive treatment with plenty of quantitative meat. Multi-author volumes seem a good idea for such a broad topic.

Elements of 3D Seismology

Chris Liner, 2004. Tulsa, USA: PennWell Publishing. List price USD 129.

Chris Liner's book and CD are not about seismic interpretation, but would make a good companion to any of the more geologically inclined books here. Fairly hardcore.

The rest and the next

Out-of-print and old books, or ones that are less particularly about seismic interpretation:

An exciting new addition will be the forthcoming book from Wiley by Duncan Irving, Richard Davies, Mads Huuse, Chris Jackson, Simon Stewart and Ralph Daber — Seismic Interpretation: A Practical Approach. Look out for that one in 2014.

Watch out for our book reviews on all these books in the coming weeks and months.

Review: The Wave Watcher's Companion

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Visit Amazon.com

The Wave Watcher's Companion: From Ocean Waves to Light Waves via Shock Waves, Stadium Waves, and All the Rest of Life's Undulations
Gavin Pretor-Pinney, Perigee (USA), Bloomsbury (UK), July 2010, $22.95

This book was on my reading list, and then on my shelf, for ages. Now I wish I'd snapped it up and read it immediately. In my defence, the end of 2010 was a busy time for me, what with turning my career upside down and everything, but I'm sure there's a lesson there somewhere...

If you think of yourself as a geophysicist, stop reading this review and buy this book immediately. 

OK, now they've gone, we can look more closely. Gavin Pretor-Pinney is the chap behind The Cloud Appreciation Society, the author of The Cloudspotter's Guide, and co-creator of The Idler Magazine. He not a scientist, but a witty writer with a high curiosity index. The book reads like an extended blog post, or a chat in the pub. A really geeky chat. 

Geophysicists are naturally drawn to all things wavy, but the book touches on sedimentology too — from dunes to tsunamis to seiches. Indeed, the author prods at some interesting questions about what exactly waves are, and whether bedforms like dunes (right) qualify as waves or not. According to Andreas Baas, "it all depends on how loose is your definition of a wave." Pretor-Pinney likes to connect all possible dots, so he settles for a loose definition, backing it up with comparisons to tanks and traffic jams. 

The most eye-opening part for me was Chapter 6, The Fifth Wave, about shock waves. I never knew that there's a whole class of waves that don't obey the normal rules of wave motion: they don't obey the speed limits, they don't reflect or refract properly, and they can't even be bothered to interfere like normal (that is, linear) waves. Just one of those moments when you realize that everything you think you know is actually a gross simplification. I love those moments.

The book is a little light on explanation. Quite a few of the more interesting parts end a little abruptly with something like, "weird, huh?". But there are plenty of notes for keeners to follow up on, and the upside is the jaunty pace and adventurous mix of examples. This one goes on my 're-read some day' shelf. (I don't re-read books, but it's the thought that counts).

Figure excerpt from Pretor-Pinney's book, copyright of the author and Penguin Publishing USA. Considered fair use.

On being the world's smallest technical publishing company

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Four months ago we launched our first book, 52 Things You Should Know About Geophysics. This little book contains 52 short essays by 37 amazing geoscientists. And me and Evan. 

Since it launched, we've been having fun hearing from people who have enjoyed it:

Yesterday's mail brought me an envelope from Stavanger — Matteo Niccoli sent me a copy of 52 Things. In doing so he beat me to the punch as I've been meaning to purchase a copy for some time. It's a good thing I didn't buy one — I'd like to buy a dozen. [a Calgary geoscientist]

A really valuable collection of advice from the elite in Geophysics to help you on your way to becoming a better more competent Geophysicist. [a review on Amazon.co.uk]

We are interested in ordering 50 to 100 copies of the book 52 Things You Should Know About Geophysics [from an E&P company. They later ordered 100.]

The economics

We thought some people might be interested in the economics of self-publishing. If you want to know more, please ask in the comments — we're happy to share our experiences. 

We didn't approach a publisher with our book. We knew we wanted to bootstrap and learn — the Agile way. Before going with Amazon's CreateSpace platform, we considered Lightning Source (another print-on-demand provider), and an ordinary 'web press' printer in China. The advantages of CreateSpace are Amazon's obvious global reach, and not having to carry any inventory. The advantages of a web press are the low printing cost per book and the range of options — recycled paper, matte finish, gatefold cover, and so on.

So, what does a book cost?

  • You could publish a book this way for $0. But, unless you're an editor and designer, you might be a bit disappointed with your results. We spent about $4000 making the book: interior design about $2000, cover design was about $650, indexing about $450. We lease the publishing software (Adobe InDesign) for about $35 per month.
  • Each book costs $2.43 to manufacture. Books are printed just in time — Amazon's machines must be truly amazing. I'd love to see them in action. 
  • The cover price is $19 at Amazon.com, about €15 at Amazon's European stores, and £12 at Amazon.co.uk. Amazon are free to offer whatever discounts they like, at their expense (currently 10% at Amazon.com). And of course you can get free shipping. Amazon charges a 40% fee, so after we pay for the manufacturing, we're left with about $8 per book. 
  • We also sell through our own estore, at $19. This is just a slightly customizable Amazon page. This channel is good for us because Amazon only charges 20% of the sale price as their fee. So we make about $12 per book this way. We can give discounts here too — for large orders, and for the authors.
  • Amazon also sells the book through a so-called expanded distribution channel, which puts the book on other websites and even into bookstores (highly unlikely in our case). Unfortunately, it doesn't give us access to universities and libraries. Amazon's take is 60% through this channel.
  • We sell a Kindle edition for $9. This is a bargain, by the way—making an attractive and functional ebook was not easy. The images and equations look terrible, ebook typography is poor, and it just feels less like a book, so we felt $9 was about right. The physical book is much nicer. Kindle royalties are complicated, but we make about $5 per sale. 

By the numbers

It doesn't pay to fixate on metrics—most of the things we care about are impossible to measure. But we're quantitative people, and numbers are hard to resist. To recoup our costs, not counting the time we lovingly invested, we need to sell 632 books. (Coincidentally, this is about how many people visit agilegeoscience.com every week.) As of right now, there are 476 books out there 'in the wild', 271 of which were sold for actual money. That's a good audience of people — picture them, sitting there, reading about geophysics, just for the love of it.

The bottom line

My wife Kara is an experienced non-fiction publisher. She's worked all over the world in editorial and production. So we knew what we were getting into, more or less. The print-on-demand stuff was new to her, and the retail side of things. We already knew we suck at marketing. But the point is, we knew we weren't in this for the money, and it's about relevant and interesting books, not marketing.

And now we know what we're doing. Sorta. We're in the process of collecting 52 Things about geology, and are planning others. So we're in this for one or two more whatever happens, and we hope we get to do many more.

We can't say this often enough: Thank You to our wonderful authors. And Thank You to everyone who has put down some hard-earned cash for a copy. You are awesome. 

Geophysicists are awesome

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Thirty-nine amazing, generous, inpiring authors contributed to our soon-to be released book about exploration geoscience. A few gave us more than one chapter: Brian Russell, Rachel Newrick, and Dave Mackidd each gave us three, and Clare Bond, José M Carcione, Don Herron, and Rob Simm did two. We humbly thank them for their boudless energy — we're happy to have provided an outlet! And Evan and I each did three chapters, partly because I was obsessed with getting to the completely arbitrary number 52. It just seemed 'right'. 

There are biographies on all the authors in the book, so you can find out for yourself what a diversity of backgrounds there is. By the numbers, out of 39 authors...

  • 10 are connected in some way to academia (5 of them full-time)
  • 19 are North American
  • 22 currently work in North America
  • 1515 papers and 14 books have been written by this crowd (not including this one :)

Update on the book: we got our proof copies on Friday and spent the weekend combing it for errors. There was nothing catastrophic, so the bugs were fixed and the book is ready! We are completely new to this self-publishing lark, so I'm not certain how the next bit goes, but I think it will be live in Amazon this Friday, a whole week early. Probably.

What happens next is also not completely clear yet. We are working on the Kindle edition, which should be out soon. In terms of layout, digital books are less complicated than print books, so we are mostly removing things that don't work or don't make sense in ebooks: page numbers, fancy formatting, forced line-breaks, etc. Once the Kindle edition is out, we will have a go at other platforms (iBooks, Google Books). Then we will turn to the web and start getting the material online, where it will no doubt be different again.

We'll keep you, dear reader, up to date right here. 

What's inside? 52 things!

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On Tuesday we announced our forthcoming community collaboration book. So what's in there? So much magic, it's hard to know where to start. Here's a list of the first dozen chapters:

  1. Anisotropy is not going away, Vladimir Grechka, Shell
  2. Beware the interpretation-to-data trap, Evan Bianco, Agile
  3. Calibrate your intuition, Taras Gerya, ETH Zürich
  4. Don’t ignore seismic attenuation, Carl Reine, Nexen
  5. Don’t neglect your math, Brian Russell, Hampson-Russell
  6. Don’t rely on preconceived notions, Eric Andersen, Talisman
  7. Evolutionary understanding in seismic interpretation, Clare Bond, University of Aberdeen
  8. Explore the azimuths, David Gray, Nexen
  9. Five things I wish I’d known, Matt Hall, Agile
  10. Geology comes first, Chris Jackson, Imperial College London
  11. Geophysics is all around, José M Carcione, OGS Trieste, Italy
  12. How to assess a colourmap, Matteo Niccoli, MyCarta blog
  13. ...

When I read that list, I cannot wait to read the book — and I've read it three times already! This is not even one quarter of the book. You can guess from the list that some are technical, others are personal, a few may be controversial.

One thing we had fun with was organizing the contents. The chapters are, as you see, in alphabetical order. But each piece has thematic tags. Some were a little hard to classify, I admit, and some people will no doubt wonder why, say, Bill Goodway's The magic of Lamé is labeled 'basics', but there you go.

One thing I did with the tags was try to group the chapters according to the tags they had. Each chapter has three tags. If we connect the three tags belonging to an individual chapter, and do the same for every chapter, then we can count the connections and draw a graph (right). I made this one in Gephi. 

The layout is automatic: relative positions are calculated by modeling the connections as springs whose stiffness depends on the number of links. Node size is a function of connectedness. Isn't it great that geology is in the middle?

Now, without worrying too much about the details, I used the graph to help group the chapters non-exclusively into the following themes:

  • Fundamentals  basics, mapping (16 chapters)
  • Concepts  geology, analogs (12 chapters)
  • Interpretation  needed a theme of its own (21 chapters)
  • Power tools  attributes, ninja skills (9 chapters)
  • Pre-stack  rock physics, pre-stack, processing (11 chapters)
  • Quantitative  mathematics, analysis (20 chapters)
  • Integration  teamwork, workflow (15 chapters)
  • Innovation  history, innovation, technology (9 chapters)
  • Skills  learning, career, managing (15 chapters)

I think this accurately reflects the variety in the book. Next post we'll have a look at the variety among the authors — perhaps it explains the breadth of themes. 

Today's the day!

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We're super-excited. We said a week ago we'd tell you why today. 

At the CSEG-CSPG conference last year, we hatched a plan. The idea was simple: ask as many amazing geoscientists as we could to write something fun and/or interesting and/or awesome and/or important about geophysics. Collect the writings. Put them in a book and/or ebook and/or audiobook,... and sell it at a low price. And also let the content out into the wild under a creative commons license, so that others can share it, copy it, and spread it.

So the idea was conceived as Things You Should Know About Geophysics. And today the book is born... almost. It will be available on 1 June, but you can see it right now at Amazon.com, pre-order or wish-list it. It will be USD19, or about 36 cents per chapter. For realz.

The brief was deliberately vague: write up to 600 words on something that excites or inspires or puzzles you about exploration geophysics. We had no idea what to expect. We knew we'd get some gold. We hoped for some rants.

Incredibly, within 24 hours of sending the first batch of invites, we had a contribution. We were thrilled, beyond thrilled, and this was the moment we knew it would work out. Like any collaborative project, it was up and down. We'd get two or three some days, then nothing for a fortnight. We extended deadlines and crossed fingers, and eventually called 'time' at year's end, with 52 contributions from 38 authors.

Like most of what we do, this is a big experiment. We think we can have it ready for 1 June but we're new to this print-on-demand lark. We think the book will be in every Amazon store (.ca, .co, .uk, etc), but it might take a few weeks to roll through all the sites. We think it'll be out as an ebook around the same time. Got an idea? Tell us how we can make this book more relevant to you!