Introducing...
EJGE Special Volume
Bouquet 08

Someone Tell Me!

Geotechnical engineering is one of the most active research and development fields of Civil Engineering. The number of articles and papers produced by geotechs each year are in the thousands. Even when local language publications, conference papers, and those in very highly specialized areas are excluded, quality papers are still too numerous. The result is either you encounter the same information many times over, or worse, miss the good ones altogether.

Therefore, it is important that from time to time someone gives you a State of the Art summary. But who? The answer is deceptively simple: whoever knows best. First, EJGE has made a list of two dozen fields in geotechnical engineering, scanned the world for the "top" expert of each field, and contacted them all. This has taken the entire months of November and December 2007 and part of January 2008, every day and night.

Questions

It was initially thought that it would be an extra issue for EJGE, and posted on the ejge.com website, which everybody knows already. Just put a link somewhere, like in the Table of Contents pages. Eventually it was decided that this was important enough for the link to be on the EJGE front page, prominantly.

One friend has suggested that it should be printed as a conventional book for libraries. The idea was good but conventional book printing, distribution, storage and selling was a major task, traditionally reserved to book publishing houses like John Wiley, McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster, American Book Publishing, and... Then there were many details of that business: paperback? hard cover? Book Publishing is a giant industry.

Another idea was to make the book available in "brick-and-mortar" bookstores like Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks, and even at amazon.com. Then amazon.com (Jeff Bezos) invented Kindle to buy any book (current count is 90 000) anywhere, wirelessly, and read it anywhere (its RAM holds 300 books). It does not use the Internet. It has its own "thing." I bought one--I'm now reading the best seller health book ("You--the User's Manual for Your Body" by Dr Mehmet Oz). You can essentially be anywhere you want and read any of your books or buy new ones.

Decisions

Then I thought we are setting up a world-class team to write the State of the Art of Geotechnical Engineering in 2008, and then confining ourselves to one particular technology! That was not smart. Why choose one? Why not do all three:

All three! That's what it will be. This is something no publisher on earth has done before. Geotechs are the first ones to do it!

One final note: Very few of the proposed people have turned us down--with apologies, typically (geotechs are extremely nice people--thank you guys, you're so sweet!). But a very few others seem to have lost their tongues, so we offer them Albert's tongue.

Geotechs of the world, I present to you...Bouquet 08! Enjoy!

Mete Oner