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See The Assayer for a general catalog of free books.

Some of these links may also be apropos: publishers, mailing lists, etc.

See The Assayer for a general catalog of free books.

Some of these links may also be apropos: publishers, mailing lists, etc.

Anyway, personally I'd love to design a GPL type collection of books to introduce CS.

Here is a catalog of books whose authors/publishers have intentionally set them free. Some, like Baen, are doing it as a form of advertising. Some are idealists. Some don't want to be bothered with the whole process of traditional publishing (only a very small percentage of published authors make enough money from book sales to live on). Many free books are documentation for free computer software.

Here is a listing of free books that might be relevant.

Reviews of the book on The Assayer would be appreciated!

There are several sites that I look at regularly for different programming things.

When I did windows development Code Project was a lifesaver, nowadays that's been replaced by the venerable Perl Monk

For online books I'd browse through The Assayer, and for zany reference nothing beats How Much Is Inside .. Stuff!

Yeah, I second this suggestion. Raymond's book is really quite good. You can find other free books on the subject, including my own, via The Assayer.

Lots of books (some on some very interesting topics) are found at The Assayer.

Some of the discussion has been about whether there's anything that Amazon doesn't do that someone else needs to do. Well, Amazon doesn't carry reviews of free books, which is actually The Assayer's main focus. (You can also review non-free books on The Assayer, and such reviews are welcomed, treasured, and cherished, just like reviews of free books :-)

Everyone should also realize that by submitting a review to Amazon, they are not in any way contributing to the free information movement. The reviews become the intellectual property of Amazon, which means you would be violating their copyright if you cross-posted your review somewhere else.

I think Internet Book List and The Assayer are doing things that are mostly complementary, not duplicative. I think the most popular use of The Assayer is actually just that people use it as a database of free books.

From surfing IBL briefly, one thing that wasn't clear to me was the legal status of reviews submitted by members...? The Assayer only accepts copylefted reviews. Cross-posting on both sites is fine with me, and if there are no legal incompatibilities, we could even share data on a wholesale basis. The Assayer's database is free for downloading, except for users' private information, such as e-mail.

Best wishes for IBL's success! From my experience, the hard part has been just enticing people to write reviews.

Check out "The Assayer" for online book information.

Well, this place does offer something in that respect

You should keep in mind, however, that the economics of publishing have changed, and are going to keep on changing. Although print on demand still hasn't really become viable, technology now makes it much more practical to print small numbers of books. My first press run was 250, and now I'm doing printings of 1000. Because these numbers are small, the financial burden of paying for printing really isn't such a crushing one. Yes, if my sales grew by another order of magnitude, then we'd be talking big bucks --- but please bite me with that problem!

Promotion? Well, doing promotion the traditional way is indeed extremely expensive. You have to hire salespeople. In my market (college textbooks), you have to send out free review copies to professors. But promotion no longer has to be that expensive. Basically I just try to drive traffic to my web site, where teachers who are interested download the book. This costs me peanuts in webhosting costs. I do a little bit of advertising in a trade magazine (The Physics Teacher), but it's still not that expensive. Of course, if you want people to beat a path to your door, your mousetrap does have to be better, not worse...

If the publish are unnecessary and are just middlemen, then go around them, for christssake, and create a better system.
Yep, that's what a lot of authors are doing now.

So I went there to register The ZooLib Cookbook, but found that they only provide for registration of books licensed under one of the licenses that they themselves publish.

The ZooLib Cookbook is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, so I can't register it there. I really don't want to change the license just to register my book.

Bruce, may I suggest you recommend to people that they register at The Assayer instead?

The Assayer also allows readers to post reviews.

And perhaps you could lobby the folks at the creative commons to allow the registration of books on their site that are under other licenses, as long as the licenses are compatible with their aims.

Here is a list of all the publishers I know of that are involved in print-publishing free books. If anyone knows of more, let me know!

Text Processing in Python is available for reviewing here

Reveiws on The Assayer would be greatly appreciated.

Here is a free online textbook on general relativity. Reviews on The Assayer would be welcome.

There's a free book on the physics of pool. Reviews here would be appreciated.

However, they also seem to be contributing to this disturbing trend of ``un-freeing'' free books. This book used to be free at the author's web page. If you click on the link, you'll find that it no longer exists. The book is no longer free, and you can only get the electronic version through Safari.

The definitive online resource for algorithms is NISTS's Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures. There is a list of algorithm resources, and you can also find some free e-books using The Assayer.

In print you should be looking for "Introduction to Algorithms, 2nd edition". It is the bible of the field. Other excellent candidates are "Data Structures and Algorithms" ( / in Java / in C).

Google will also tell you to look here, here and here.

How about reviewing them here on The Assayer?

This brings up an interesting issue, which is how you measure the size of a free book's audience. It's really, really hard to do, especially for books that, like these two, are not being sold in print. If I want to judge how many people are using Halliday as a physics textbook compared to Serway, it's pretty easy to get a general idea. For example, I can look at the sales rankings on amazon.com or Barnes and Noble's web site. But what do you do for a book for which there are no sales figures? I'm sure there's some equation of the form

• (actual number of readers)=(constant)x(number of downloads)

While popularity is interesting, it's ultimately less important than quality. Would you be interested in reading the On-Line Biophysics Textbook and writing a review on The Assayer?

The Assayer appears to be partially slashdotted right now. It's still serving up static HTML, but it won't let you use any of the CGIs, so you can't browse the database, read reviews, sign on as a member, or write reviews right now. That's a shame, since I ended the article with a plea for reviews! I hope people will try back later when the server is able to handle the load. Lots of people have already posted here on Slashdot about their favorite free books, and it would be great if they could put reviews on The Assayer eventually.

Here are links to other print publishers who make some or all of their books available for free in digital form. (Scroll down to "Publishers Who Do Free Books.")

www.theassayer.org

The Assayer is a site for user-submitted book reviews, with an emphasis on reviews of free books. It turns out to be very difficult to attract reviews, so if you've read any of these, reviews would be much appreciated!

• Using Samba
• Practical Postgresql
• The Art of Assembly Language Programming

• Using Samba
• Practical Postgresql
• The Art of Assembly Language Programming

• Using Samba
• Practical Postgresql
• The Art of Assembly Language Programming

I've written a review of this book on The Assayer. The book is self-published (the authors run Green Tea Press), and one of the things people don't realize about self-publishing is how hard it is to attract reviews. (Actually, it's hard in ordinary publishing, and even harder in self-publishing.) Without reviews, you don't get much credibility. So if there's a free book in The Assayer's database that you've read, please write a review!

I've written a review of this book on The Assayer. The book is self-published (the authors run Green Tea Press), and one of the things people don't realize about self-publishing is how hard it is to attract reviews. (Actually, it's hard in ordinary publishing, and even harder in self-publishing.) Without reviews, you don't get much credibility. So if there's a free book in The Assayer's database that you've read, please write a review!

The most popular subjects there are "Science, Math and Computing" with 289 titles. There are quite a few other subjects covered there too.

The Assayer is more than just a list of books though - it has reader-contributed reviews. For example, here is the entry for DocBook: The Definitive Guide by Norman Walsh (available at www.docbook.org). There is a review at the bottom of the entry page.

I'm writing a Free book, although it is at a very early draft stage. The ZooLib Cookbook is a tutorial for the ZooLib cross-platform application framework.

I'm also slowly creating a copylefted collection of articles on software quality at the Linux Quality Database.

The most popular subjects there are "Science, Math and Computing" with 289 titles. There are quite a few other subjects covered there too.

The Assayer is more than just a list of books though - it has reader-contributed reviews. For example, here is the entry for DocBook: The Definitive Guide by Norman Walsh (available at www.docbook.org). There is a review at the bottom of the entry page.

I'm writing a Free book, although it is at a very early draft stage. The ZooLib Cookbook is a tutorial for the ZooLib cross-platform application framework.

I'm also slowly creating a copylefted collection of articles on software quality at the Linux Quality Database.

The most popular subjects there are "Science, Math and Computing" with 289 titles. There are quite a few other subjects covered there too.

The Assayer is more than just a list of books though - it has reader-contributed reviews. For example, here is the entry for DocBook: The Definitive Guide by Norman Walsh (available at www.docbook.org). There is a review at the bottom of the entry page.

I'm writing a Free book, although it is at a very early draft stage. The ZooLib Cookbook is a tutorial for the ZooLib cross-platform application framework.

I'm also slowly creating a copylefted collection of articles on software quality at the Linux Quality Database.

For books, see this link.

There are hundreds of them here. Very few are the kind of dopey software manuals you're referring to. Is that a "dearth?"

My own review is here. To me, the most interesting thing about the book was the way it documented how pseudoscience has invaded otherwise respectable organizations like NASA.

... Charles Vest, president of MIT, as an aside mentioned that when college textbook presses (like the one at MIT) put up free e-text copies of their new textbooks at the same time they published the print version, sales of the print versions went UP.

If it works to increase the sale for things as over priced as the normal college textbook...

Does anyone know what the actual textbook(s) is he's referring to? AFAIK, my site The Assayer is the biggest catalog on the web of books that have been intentionally made free-as-in-something by their authors, and I don't have any of the examples he's referring to. I'd be grateful if anyone could reply here about what they are, so I can add them in.

What he's saying matches up perfectly with my own experience with self-publishing free books. My own books are free-as-in-copyleft, and are also for sale in dead tree format. I've done very little traditional promotion, and yet my books have been fairly successful, considering that it's not easy for a self-published author to break into the textbook market. As the author of the article points out, it's pretty hard to know for sure whether certain sales results are the result of any particular action, such as making books available for free in digital form. But one good indication is that the small amount of non-web promotion that I did (sending out free evaluation copies on CD) was nearly all in California, whereas none of the teachers who have adopted my books are in California.

PG is great for old public-domain books that volunteers have digitized. For newer books whose authors have intentionally made them free-as-in-something, see my own site, The Assayer. (The Assayer runs on open-source Perl with DBI, but I doubt the code would be useful to anyone else --- it was my very first Perl app, and it shows...)

• "Music and most books are not like software, because they don't generally need to be debugged or maintained...I do not want to weaken the winning argument for open sourcing software by tying it to a potential loser," (ESR quote)

• The main problem is that the experts Sanger wants to recruit to write articles [for Nupedia] have little incentive to participate. They don't score academic brownie points in the same way software engineers do for upgrading Linux, and Nupedia can't pay them.

From reading the article, you wouldn't have any idea that there were many successful open-source book projects, and many more that are free as in beer.

ESR and Sanger are both referring to the relative lack of success the bazaar model, but that doesn't mean that copyleft itself is a failure outside of the software world.

I think Nupedia's problems also have less to do with the issue Sanger discusses than with poor design of the project. I tried writing a Nupedia article, and it was a horrendous experience. Many of the reviewers were excellent, but among them were some who were just very difficult to deal with, and I spent weeks and weeks going around in circles trying to satisfy them, just to get my 5-paragraph article through the system. Most of these people had never even bothered to fill out their bio forms, so it wasn't even clear whether they were qualified to review the article for content.

It's not even true that the bazaar model is a complete failure outside of software. For instance, this book was written using the bazaar model. And even when it comes to doftware, I think ESR's ideas are more of an idealization than a realistic description of how open source works.

• "Music and most books are not like software, because they don't generally need to be debugged or maintained...I do not want to weaken the winning argument for open sourcing software by tying it to a potential loser," (ESR quote)

• The main problem is that the experts Sanger wants to recruit to write articles [for Nupedia] have little incentive to participate. They don't score academic brownie points in the same way software engineers do for upgrading Linux, and Nupedia can't pay them.

From reading the article, you wouldn't have any idea that there were many successful open-source book projects, and many more that are free as in beer.

ESR and Sanger are both referring to the relative lack of success the bazaar model, but that doesn't mean that copyleft itself is a failure outside of the software world.

I think Nupedia's problems also have less to do with the issue Sanger discusses than with poor design of the project. I tried writing a Nupedia article, and it was a horrendous experience. Many of the reviewers were excellent, but among them were some who were just very difficult to deal with, and I spent weeks and weeks going around in circles trying to satisfy them, just to get my 5-paragraph article through the system. Most of these people had never even bothered to fill out their bio forms, so it wasn't even clear whether they were qualified to review the article for content.

It's not even true that the bazaar model is a complete failure outside of software. For instance, this book was written using the bazaar model. And even when it comes to doftware, I think ESR's ideas are more of an idealization than a realistic description of how open source works.

If you're just looking for online books, there are lots of them; e.g., here and here and here. Of course, almost all books for which the copyright has expired are online somewhere -- although very few, if any, IT books would fall into that category.

They just don't think it would make good business sense, and most publishers probably are in the business to make money, not for good will.
Clearly your generalization fails in some of the cases I mentioned above. I think some publishers have realized that, at least for certain kinds of books, having it available online is a form of free publicity, and doesn't necessarily subtract from sales. After all, most people don't want to read a book off of a computer screen, or have to have it in the form of a stack of unbound, single-sided printer output. Personally (here's my shameless plug), I've had some luck selling printed copies of my own self-published copylefted books, even though they're free downloads.

In reply to the original poster's question, you might want to look at (shameless plug #2!) this list of copylefted books, which is from the database of my book-reviewing site The Assayer. That way you can get an idea of what licenses other people are using.

The Assayer is a site I run for user-submitted book reviews, with an emphasis on reviews of free books. Look here for a a database of free books, and here is a listing by subject. (The site includes some non-free books as well -- free ones have a bud or flower icon.)

The Assayer is a site I run for user-submitted book reviews, with an emphasis on reviews of free books. Look here for a a database of free books, and here is a listing by subject. (The site includes some non-free books as well -- free ones have a bud or flower icon.)

Reviews on The Assayer would be another nice way to give positive feedback if you like the books, and like the free-information approach!

Either pay $143, or try a free book here.

• For free hosting of free-as-in-speech books, see Andamooka. They also allow you to give annotations and comments.
• For a catalog and reviews, see my site, The Assayer.
• Opencontent.org - licenses, and a directory of open-content works
• Internet Public Library
• Project Gutenberg
• ibiblio - an archive of free information
• On-Line Books Page and Book People mailing list - has an emphasis on old books that have fallen into the public domain
• Samizdat.com hosts a bunch of free books, plus lots of good articles and links
• Association des Bibliophiles Universels - hosts PD texts in French