An Organic Chemistry Text Teachers and Students can tune.
Our openly licensed organic chemistry textbook is now generally available. Readers set how much detail they get and how every structure is drawn; instructors set what the course carries. Here is what adjusts, and the licensing and AI policies that come with it.
Testosterone, black-and-white transitioning to Pride colors, based on a student preference selection.
Our organic chemistry textbook is generally available at /reader/organic. Published chapters are openly licensed and free to read with no account.
This is unlike any other organic textbook. It was built with AI tooling that lets you adjust the content. As a student all you need to know is that it adjusts to your preferences. Change the depth of coverage depending on whether you are reviewing for a test, digging deep into one topic, or refreshing your memory before the next course. Take notes, highlight sections, turn passages into flashcards, and control how the molecules and reactions are displayed. Our built-in ChemLingo tool lets you hear exactly how the name of a molecule is pronounced, following the American Chemical Society's guidance on the pronunciation of chemical names1. It runs in the browser, covers the standard two-semester sequence, and can be downloaded or read on your phone, computer, or e-reader. Version 1.0 — the first complete edition, all 31 chapters — is live now: read it at /reader/organic or take the accessibility-checked PDF and EPUB from the downloads page, no account required.
As a teacher you might consider adopting our full system, including homework and a slide deck creator. We are partnering with VitalSource and Follett to ensure this text can be available to your students at our bookstore. Underneath all these tools is a concept map for the course and for each chapter. Now the small changes you want do not eat up days re-writing everything. Our AI tools do the tedious part. When you move the NMR chapter, or drop MO theory, or add a catalysis chapter, they update every chapter, every homework question assigned, every figure: the reordering and the optional topics in CourseHouse, and whole new chapters through CourseHouse.
The one thing that stays fixed while you adjust everything else is accurate chemistry. This is not asking a chatbot to draw a molecule. Every molecule, figure, diagram, and homework question is produced by tools built to draw chemistry correctly, designed by a thirty-year veteran of teaching organic chemistry, and built on current research into how chemistry is best taught.
Tuning how the chemistry looks
Every chapter opens with a preferences panel. Detail level is the headline control: the same section can read concise, standard, or detailed, but the more interesting settings sit underneath it.
Reading depth. The detail slider changes how much prose each section carries without swapping chapters. Pronunciation name lets a reader hear structures called by IUPAC, common, or in-text names. Image set picks which curated illustration to show when more than one version exists.
Tone. On chapters that carry them, a Tone option in advanced settings offers the same chemistry in three voices. Original is the text as authored. Direct keeps to plain, fact-focused sentences at a simpler reading level, with no idioms or asides. Helpful adds a teacher's scaffolding: where to focus, how to study a topic, and the occasional carefully chosen analogy.
What appears on the page. Separate checkboxes hide or show McMurry/OpenStax cross-links, Wikipedia links, structure diagrams, and embedded videos. Those links can add depth to your reading, and you can turn them off if you would rather not have them.
Molecule display. Each student can pick: explicit hydrogens, bond color, atom coloring, contrast, label size, and optional Pride coloring of molecules. Bond color and atom palette are independent: a reader can keep heteroatoms colored while drawing bonds in red, or run everything in high-contrast black and white. These controls come out of the same accessibility work as our structure reading and reduced-visual-overload tools.
Study tools on the same page. Select any passage to highlight it, attach a sticky note, or turn it into a flashcard. Bookmarks and the study-tools drawer keep those marks in one place as you move through the chapter. Signed-in readers sync them across devices; anonymous visitors can try the full interaction before creating an account.
Turning on explicit hydrogens, high contrast and larger labels redraws the molecule rather than zooming a picture of it:
Phenol with explicit hydrogens, heavier bonds and larger labels: the same figure, re-rendered.
Pride coloring is in the same panel, and it works the way a chemist would want: the palette runs across the structure by atom position, so it is a property of the molecule rather than a filter laid over a picture of it.
Two dimensions or three
There are a lot of ways to represent a molecule, and different representations work better for different learning goals. Where an author has approved it, a figure can be switched between a flat drawing and a 3D model, and 3D can be shown as ball-and-stick or space-filling. Some reaction, mechanism and stereochemistry figures stay in the authored view, because that view was the point of the figure.
Ibuprofen, monochrome to CPK and through the 3D styles. Rendered on the server from the structure, so it stays the same molecule throughout.
Figures on: phenol as the chapter normally shows it.
Figures built with our tools
Static images are not the only figure type in the reader. Where a teaching argument needs a diagram that stays tied to chemistry, we embed assets authored with the same tools on the Generator canvas: Newman projections with actual calculated torsion scans, reaction-coordinate diagrams with experimental ΔH overlays, hybridization occupancy boxes, and conformational energy profiles from real dihedral scans.
The NMR spectroscopy chapter adds interactive figures that run entirely in the browser. Readers can count spin arrangements to see where multiplet intensity ratios come from, build a multiplet by adding neighbor groups one at a time, and compare the same molecule at different field strengths without leaving the page. Nothing is submitted or stored; the tools are there to make splitting and coupling tangible while you read.
Build a multiplet from neighbor groups: the splitting-tree interactive figure in the NMR chapter.
A Newman figure in the cycloalkanes chapter is not a screenshot: it is a Newman projection object paired with a conformational energy profile whose curve comes from an RDKit torsion scan, not an artist's guess at the barrier heights.
The Newman tool on the Generator canvas, the same object type embedded in reader chapters, with an RDKit torsion scan at the top.
Reaction-coordinate diagrams carry the same discipline: barrier sizes are qualitative, but product-well depth can show a verified ΔH from the NIST Chemistry WebBook. Hybridization figures offer both classic energy diagrams and misconception-resistant occupancy boxes, rendered deterministically from the structure under discussion.
The reaction-coordinate editor: step count, direction and barrier size are the controls; the transition-state peaks are placed by the Hammond postulate. Also used inside published chapters.
Hybridization diagrams in the reader use the same deterministic output as the Orbital & Hybridization tool.
Tuning what the course contains
The reader-side settings are for whoever is reading. Instructors get a different set of controls, in the CourseHouse:
- Chapter order that follows the textbook your syllabus is already built around.
- Optional topics you can uncheck, so material you do not teach stops appearing in your students' exports and slides.
- Wordiness and depth sliders that set the default reading level for the course.
- Question banks and LMS delivery, so homework lands in the gradebook you already use.
More on the course-building side is on the CourseHouse page.
Where AI helps, and where it doesn't
If you adopt ChemIllusion for homework, question banks delivered through your LMS with grade passback, each chapter carries an assistant scoped to that chapter's content. It explains, prompts, and critiques a student's attempt on the problems you assigned. It does not hand over an answer, and it does not decide grades: scoring stays deterministic and separate from anything an AI model says. AI can help evaluate a mechanism, but the teacher makes the final decision on the grade.
AI is optional in our system and both students and teachers can weigh in on how and where it is used. When you do use it, you control the assistant's instructions, and those instructions are visible to students rather than hidden. The full set of commitments, including that course materials and submissions are not used for model training by default. Read more on our AI Principles page.
Openly licensed
Chapter content is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0: you can reuse it with credit, under the same license. The software, interactive tools and branding around it are not part of that grant. Sources are tracked as either linked or embedded, and an embedded source's terms flow into ours while a linked one's do not. Per-chapter attributions, down to the Wikipedia revisions used, are at /reader/organic/attributions.
EPUB cover for offline reading on your phone, computer, or e-reader.
The chemistry figures in this textbook are not produced by an AI image model. They come from cheminformatics rendering, committed drawing code, and plotted data. Every hosted figure records how it is made.
Where decorative or schematic artwork is generated, you can require it come from Bria, whose model is trained exclusively on licensed data. You can also select other AI providers to add images to the book. Whichever you pick, that provider's terms apply and the provider is recorded in your export's provenance, on the terms set out in our resource license.
1 American Chemical Society, “Pronunciation of Chemical Names,” Industrial and Engineering Chemistry News Edition, 1934.