[1] The book has been highly influential and has seen widespread adoption; Marvin L. Cohen remarked in 2019 that Kittel's content choices in the original edition played a large role in defining the field of solid-state physics.

[3] The book is published by John Wiley and Sons and, as of 2018, it is in its ninth edition and has been reprinted many times as well as translated into over a dozen languages, including Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.

[4] Henry Ehrenreich has noted that before the first edition of Introduction to Solid State Physics came out in 1953, there were no other textbooks on the subject; rather, the young field's study material was spread across several prominent articles and treatises.

[3] The field of solid state physics was very new at the time of writing and was defined by only a few treatises that, in the Ehrenreich's view, expounded rather than explained the topics and were not suitable as textbooks.

They also noted that Kittel's content choices played a large role in defining the field of solid-state physics.