Slashdot Mirror

Right now, there's a huge profit incentive for patent trolls because of the huge payouts in damages when these lawsuits are won.

The slashdot headline, and, to some extent, the slashdot summary, make it sound like Google and Apple are the only ones compiling bogus patents, but it works both ways, of course. They sue other people for patent infringement, but they also get sued. The big difference is that Google and Apple really do have R&D, and really do come up with at least some things that deserve to be patented, whereas the typical patent troll has never made any positive contributions, and is simply hoping to take advantage of the fact that the patent office doesn't really care whether applications are nontrivial.

I got subpoenaed last week by a lawyer from Google, because Google is getting sued by a patent troll (I don't know the name of the company), and Google wants to use the web site in my sig, which dates back to 2001, to prove prior art and invalidate the patent. It's apparently a business methods patent. You might ask, "How do you know that they're a patent troll when you don't even know the company's name, and don't know anything about the patent other than the fact that it's a methods patent?" Well, the way I know that is that I built that site, and it required absolutely zero innovation or creativity on my part. If you take a look a the code, you'll see that it's embarrassingly amateurish -- I think it was the very first Perl code I ever wrote. I simply bought the O'Reilly book on the Perl DBI interface, and built a bog-standard web-based front end for a SQL database. The database is nothing but a digital library catalog, the sole difference being that most such catalogs keep track of a physical collection of books, whereas mine is a catalog of books that are free on the web. It also has a feature where users can write reviews.

Responding to the subpoena (as I'm legally required to do) has been and continues to be a minor pain in the ass. But it's just absurd that any patent examiner allowed anyone to patent anything that went into my web site, because it required zero originality. For that reason, I feel like I'm doing something somewhat positive for society by helping Google deliver a smackdown to this troll.

Google and Apple are probably both companies that would benefit greatly from patent reform, including the elimination of software and business method patents. The big losers would be the patent trolls.

How do I as a user decide whether to download such books?

I think you asked a wonderful question. Right now, I believe the best answer is to go here but that answer is not very useful.

Another answer is to go here but that isn't terribly useful either.

Another resource is here.

I agree with you, though. Being able to answer the question "How to I find talented, yet undiscovered authors so I can read their work?" is a question that begs to be answered.

As others have mentioned, this is nothing but the latest attempt to kill off the used books market. The textbook industry is just a big racket.

Curiously, the obvious solution of using widely available free online textbooks is ignored (see e.g. http://theassayer.org/ for a directory). Oh yeah, can't do that because we "need to save the textbook industry".

Of course, free online textbooks aren't the answer to everything, say for some grad-level specialized course the selection of appropriate textbooks might be quite limited, if available at all. But for all those massive "XXX 101" courses, surely the free online resources are plentiful, and some even very good quality. Or maybe even better, as a free online textbook writer has no incentive to bulk up the book with useless fluff, which just wastes student time when reading.

This is a pilot program, Houghton Mifflin and/or Apple are probably subsidizing it.

This may be partly a reaction to California's Free Digital Textbook Initiative. I went to a symposium about the FDTI last summer (more about that symposium here. The people interested enough to come were an odd-bedfellows mixture of free-information enthusiasts, commercial textbook companies, and computer hardware companies. The ones with a really, really strong pecuniary motive for participating are the hardware companies. This is a gigantic potential gold mine for them. From the point of view of the book publishers, it was clear that they were about as enthusiastic about it as they would be about a skunk at a bridal shower, and the only reason they were there was to gauge how horrible the threat was.

This pilot program would then represent the perfect confluence of interests between the publishers and the hardware companies. Once you get rid of the pesky idea of having the textbooks become free, it becomes a wonderful potential gravy train for all of them.

A pilot program is designed to measure the effectiveness of the device and the costs. It is plausible that a reusable digital device loaded with numerous textbooks could be less expensive than the corresponding set of paper textbooks. Also keep in mind that today's $500 iPad will probably be around $250 in a couple of years. and those are retail prices not educational institution prices.

Not so sure about this. My kid just started high school, and she had IIRC 30 lb of books. Since she sometimes walks to and from school, we bought her her own copies of some of her books to keep at home. They were actually surprisingly inexpensive, especially compared to the exploitative cost of college-level textbooks.

But computer companies have a long-established practice of being willing to lose money in order to get impressionable K-12 kids used to their hardware and software, on the theory that the kids will then be loyal customers after they grow up. Apple has done this using educational discounts on their hardware. MS did it in their early history by winking at piracy. Amazon has of course been losing money hand over fist on the Kindle in order to build market share.

For example:

theassayer.org

freetechbooks.com

I assume all the students have computers to read the textbooks? I guess a laptop for each student is cheaper than the cumulative cost of the textbooks depending on how long they keep the same textbook around

This was a huge topic of discussion at the symposium where the results were announced. I've blogged about it here, but I'll quote the relevant part of what I wrote: "Nobody seemed sure about the implications of the settlement in the Williams case, which requires equal access to books for all students. Will poor students be locked out because they don't have computers? Schwarzenegger's proposed solution is to print out books as needed, but Murugan Pal from CK-12 pointed out that current state law allows a school to use textbook funds to pay $80 for a book from a commercial publisher, but forbids it to pay $10 to print out a copy of a free book at Kinko's."

There was a heavy presence from the computer hardware industry, too. They love the idea of walking into a California public school and selling one netbook per student.

I was at the symposium where the results were announced, and I wrote up some notes about it here. It was actually a pretty interesting panel discussion, with open-source types side by side on the platform along with reps from the publishing industry and the computer hardware industry (which is drooling over the opportunity this represents of selling more computers to schools so they can access electronic books).

The slashdot summary is not particularly accurate.

1. It wasn't a competition. Anyone could submit a book, and it wasn't like one had to lose so another could win. The state simply checked submissions to see whether they covered the topics listed in the standard.
2. "Many traditional publishers submitted textbooks..." I don't think this is true. I believe that only Pearson submitted anything.

What Pearson submitted was just a consumable biology workbook, so it's not especially surprising that it wasn't judged as developing all the topics on the list.

The story isn't really that the traditional publishers tried and failed, it's that they essentially sat this one out. Pearson did a half-assed token submission, and the other publisher that had a rep at the symposium, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, didn't submit anything at all. They're clearly highly allergic to the "free" part of "Free Digital Textbook Initiative."

Quick answer:

Introduction to Information & Communication Technology - Using Free Software and Open Technologies
Edited By: Will Brady
http://openbookproject.net/courses/intro2ict/index.xhtml

The Non-nerds Guide to Computers
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Non-nerds_Guide_to_Computers

But seriously spend half an hour going through results of Google search on these terms: open textbooks computing

You will have to go through the texts yourself but there are many out there at many different levels.

Here are the main resources.

Wikibooks
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Computing
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Non-nerds_Guide_to_Computers
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Computers_for_Beginners

Flat World Knowledge
http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/

MIT Open Courseware
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_OpenCourseWare
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/index.htm

Make Textbooks Affordable open textbooks
http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org/statement.asp?id2=37833

Student PIRGs
http://www.studentpirgs.org/open-textbooks-catalog#computersci

List at Walla Walla Community College
http://www.wwcc.edu/CMS/index.php?id=2835

The Assayer free books list
http://theassayer.org/
http://www.theassayer.org/cgi-bin/asbrowsesubject.cgi?class=Q#freeclassQAc

California Learning Resource Network (only math and science)
http://clrn.org/FDTI/index.cfm

OER Consortium
http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/#Computer

Open Book Project
http://openbookproject.net/
http://www.openbookproject.net/courses/

Introduction to Information & Communication Technology - Using Free Software and Open Technologies
Edited By: Will Brady
http://openbookproject.net/courses/intro2ict/index.xhtml

O'Reilly Open Books
http://oreilly.com/openbook/

Textbook Revolution
http://www.textbookrevolution.org/index.php/Book:Lists/Subjects/Computer_Science

http://www.opentextbook.org/
http://freelearning.bccampus.ca/openTextbook.php?page_id=221&bookmark=Computing

Quick answer:

Introduction to Information & Communication Technology - Using Free Software and Open Technologies
Edited By: Will Brady
http://openbookproject.net/courses/intro2ict/index.xhtml

The Non-nerds Guide to Computers
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Non-nerds_Guide_to_Computers

But seriously spend half an hour going through results of Google search on these terms: open textbooks computing

You will have to go through the texts yourself but there are many out there at many different levels.

Here are the main resources.

Wikibooks
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Computing
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Non-nerds_Guide_to_Computers
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Computers_for_Beginners

Flat World Knowledge
http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/

MIT Open Courseware
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_OpenCourseWare
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/index.htm

Make Textbooks Affordable open textbooks
http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org/statement.asp?id2=37833

Student PIRGs
http://www.studentpirgs.org/open-textbooks-catalog#computersci

List at Walla Walla Community College
http://www.wwcc.edu/CMS/index.php?id=2835

The Assayer free books list
http://theassayer.org/
http://www.theassayer.org/cgi-bin/asbrowsesubject.cgi?class=Q#freeclassQAc

California Learning Resource Network (only math and science)
http://clrn.org/FDTI/index.cfm

OER Consortium
http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/#Computer

Open Book Project
http://openbookproject.net/
http://www.openbookproject.net/courses/

Introduction to Information & Communication Technology - Using Free Software and Open Technologies
Edited By: Will Brady
http://openbookproject.net/courses/intro2ict/index.xhtml

O'Reilly Open Books
http://oreilly.com/openbook/

Textbook Revolution
http://www.textbookrevolution.org/index.php/Book:Lists/Subjects/Computer_Science

http://www.opentextbook.org/
http://freelearning.bccampus.ca/openTextbook.php?page_id=221&bookmark=Computing

Here is a catalog of a few hundred free math books.

Are there any good, free resources for learning Algebra and up?

There are plenty of sites and free books online that will get you through calculus. For (elementary, not linear or abstract) algebra, a Google search should net you hundreds of sites. For higher subjects, http://www.theassayer.org/ should get you started.

As Hatta suggested, used bookstores and thrift stores are good for cheap high school-level textbooks. Don't count on finding anything higher than calculus texts, though. If you're looking for texts to study abstract algebra, set theory, game theory, et cetera, you may have to visit a university library to find physical books.

Indeed. They should take advantage of the open-source textbooks that already exist... either by simply selecting one for their purposes, or putting together the best pieces from various sources into a coherent textbook that serves their purposes. Here are the open-source textbook (or related information) sites I'm aware of:

Pointers to Textbooks and Content:
http://textbookrevolution.org/
http://www.opentextbook.org/
http://www.theassayer.org/
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/
http://globaltext.terry.uga.edu/
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Books

Some available lecture notes:
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html#languages
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/

Indeed, there are a lot of similar efforts out there. Hopefully they will use some of the existing sources. Take a at The Assayer and other site like Open Textbook to get an idea of some of the great things already being done in this area.

They also have "How To Think Like a Computer Scientist..." titles in C++ and Java. All the books are free as in speech. User-submitted reviews would be welcome at theassayer.org (make an account, search by title on the initial string "how to").

• The Assayer
• Open Text Book
• Ink Textbooks
• Free Curricula Center
• Free Textbook Project
• Flat World Knowledge
• Textbook Revolution
• Wikibooks

For example, although Ben Crowell, the original poster, doesn't mention it, he himself founded The Assayer, a site that lists free books, carries reader reviews, etc.

Since 2001, I've been publishing a number of original mathematics textbooks as ebooks at the Trillia Group, all of which are DRM-free and freely licensed for student's self study. I'd hoped to license the "bits", rather than use dead trees as DRM, and have universities buy perpetual site licenses for $300. That business model hasn't worked; American universities are used to paying nothing for the textbooks they use in the classroom (even the books that the professors and teaching assistants use to teach the course are given to the universities free by the publishers), and for the most part the universities can't comprehend transferring the small cost for a site license for a text from the students to themselves.

Some academic publishers, including Cambridge University Press, allow some of their mathematics authors to distribute texts freely on the web even while the book is published in hard-cover editions. Perhaps this will become more common in the future.

One place to look for them is the Assayer.

Free textbooks are doing great these days, and it's not by taking formerly proprietary books and paying to make them free. See my sig for a catalog of free books, including hundreds of college textbooks whose authors made them free simply because they felt like it.

Want a free calculus book, for example? This list has five or six of them.

The reason nobody has heard of it is probably the evil college bookstore cartel.
I think it's a bit of a stretch to blame college bookstores for this. They're mostly nonprofit. It's the publishers who are really being evil.

They will break your hands with hammers if they find out you have been using free textbooks instead of the ones they sell.
I'm currently typing this with two unbroken hands, after 9 years of using free textbooks in my physics classes.

There are already hundreds of free college textbooks on the web:

• theassayer.org (a catalog of free books in general, not just textbooks; accepts user-submitted reviews)
• textbookrevolution.org (a site specifically devoted to free textbooks)
• libertytextbooks.org (a selection of high-quality free textbooks)

Wikibooks was originally envisioned as a project that would have textbooks as its main raison d'etre, but IMO it's failed at that goal. Although there are quite a few textbooks at the wikibooks site, almost none of them are of high enough quality to be widely adopted for classroom use. I don't think that's particularly surprising, because the wiki method is simply unsuited to the task of writing textbooks. The killer app for wikibooks right now seems to be books about video games.

User-submitted reviews would be welcom at theassayer.org, a site I run that catalogs free books, and accepts reviews of them.

Here is a recent USA Today article that talks about something similar to what you're referring to. Free textbooks aren't hypothetical, they already exist. A sugar-daddy philanthropist isn't required; professors are already doing it for the same reason they've always written textbooks. (Hint: they've never expected to make any significant amount of money on the typical textbook.) Some good starting points:

• theassayer.org
• textbookrevolution.org

-MIT's Open Courseware at: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

-Textbook revolution at http://textbookrevolution.org/

-Physiscs texts at: http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html#langua ges

-The assayer at http://www.theassayer.org/

-Open content at http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/Technolo gy/OpenContent/opencontent.htm

I also know a number of econometric and statistics texts that are also available as free Ebooks, but they are of interest only to specialists.

Theassayer.org is sort of orthogonal to the ones you've listed: it only lists free books.

One good thing about electronic books that aren't DRM-encumbered is that you can print them out on paper, so you don't have to wait for some vaporware e-ink technology in order to have a book that you can read on the toilet, in the tub, on the bus, by the pool, ...

Wikimedia Commons is nice, and I use it now and then to find illustrations to add to some free textbooks I've written, but actually most of the good content on Wikimedia Commons just seems to be duplicates of images from WP articles (albeit organized in a different, and sometimes more convenient, way).

Wikinews doesn't seem to have reached the kind of critical mass it would need in order to serve as an alternative to a newspaper, and I don't think it ever will -- there just don't seem to be a lot of people who are willing to do the work of being newspaper reporters, and do it for free.

And finally Wikibooks, which is mentioned briefly in the article, is pretty pathetic. You can spend an hour clicking around on Wikibooks without ever finding a successful, well written, complete book. Of the hundreds of free books out there in the world, I know of exactly one that is a real, complete, successful book written using the wiki method: Wikipedia.

An encyclopedia is uniquely well suited to the wiki method. It's inherently parallelizable, and it makes sense for A. Random User to do five minutes worth of work on it and have that work constitute an improvement that's instantly visible to the world. That's just not true of other types of writing.

WHAT SIG???
The one that you won't see if you have your prefs set so sigs don't show up:
The Assayer-books for the free-information revolution

• Relativity Simply Explained by Martin Gardner
• Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy by Kip Thorne
• Spacetime Physics by Taylor and Wheeler (special relativity, with a little more math)
• Exploring Black Holes: Introduction to General Relativity by by Taylor and Wheeler (general relativity, with a little more math)
• QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman
• Three Roads to Quantum Gravity by Lee Smolin

Both books are listed on The Assayer, my site that catalogs free books and accepts user-submitted reviews. Reviews of either one (Doctorow, Stross) would be greatly appreciated!

Both books are listed on The Assayer, my site that catalogs free books and accepts user-submitted reviews. Reviews of either one (Doctorow, Stross) would be greatly appreciated!

Both books are listed on The Assayer, my site that catalogs free books and accepts user-submitted reviews. Reviews of either one (Doctorow, Stross) would be greatly appreciated!

The book is listed here on The Assayer. User-submitted reviews would be appreciated!

The book is available for reviewing here on The Assayer.

I've read The Road to Reality, and would not recommend it to anyone who doesn't have at least an undergraduate degree in math or physics. You have to read hundreds and hundreds of pages of math before you even get to any physics, and the math is not explained thoroughly and clearly enough that a layperson could really understand it. For me, it was like, "Oh yeah, I remember that course in grad school," but if I hadn't already had the course, I wouldn't have been able to follow it.

If you need somewhere to start, and don't know any physics, try one of the free introductory physics books listed here. After that, if you want to try to bring yourself up to the level Penrose is shooting for, try some of these:

• Relativity Simply Explained by Martin Gardner
• Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy by Kip Thorne
• Spacetime Physics by Taylor and Wheeler (special relativity, with a little more math)
• Exploring Black Holes: Introduction to General Relativity by by Taylor and Wheeler (general relativity, with a little more math)
• QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman
• Three Roads to Quantum Gravity by Lee Smolin

Wow, check out the Perens series' web page -- I hadn't realized they'd brought out so many titles. This is really impressively enlightened for a traditional print publisher. Note that all the books are available under a real free-as-in-speech license. Of the publishers that have tried making books free in digital form, almost all have made them free as in beer only. Prentice-Hall has really gone out on a limb for free information with the Perens series; it's even legal for their competitors to bring out competing editions of the same books! I hope this experiment turns out to be a commercial success, because that would be a big victory for free-as-in-speech books, and it would also help some of these writers to make a living while doing free information. BTW, all the books in the series are available for reviewing on theassayer.org.

It's also worth pointing out that the article itself is free as in beer, but not free as in speech. They published it under their own modified version of the CC attribution/no-derivatives/noncommercial license, with some onerous restrictions tacked on (e.g., if you distribute it, you have to notify them and send them a copy).

Whoops -- I botched the link in the parent post. The URL should have been theassayer.org.

Try The Assayer. It's a catalog of free books, specializing in modern books that have been set free by their authors (not old public domain books, which you can get on Project Gutenberg). Users can also submit reviews. There are some links here that might also be of interest.

Cory Doctorow:

Eastern Standard Tribe (CC)
A Place So Foreign (and eight more) (CC)
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (CC)

Lawrence Lessig:

Free Culture

Tech and science books:

Version Control with Subversion (CC)
An open source math book
Light and Matter, a series of physics texts by Ben Crowell

Lists:
The Assayer is a place to find and review open books.

Creating Applications with Mozilla is listed here on theassayer.org, and a user-submitted review would be very welcome!

There are several free SQL books available (one on MySQL, one on SQL in general, and a couple on PostgreSQL; use your browser to search within the text of the page for SQL). User-submitted reviews would be welcome on theassayer.org.

• I disagree - van Gogh, Michaelangelo and Leonardo, all taught themselves technique and then got to where they were through relentless practice and perseverance. Figure studies, copies, sketches, early drafts, training - none of these artists works just suddenly appeared.

1. There's no secret ingredient to artistic creativity. Inspiration doesn't just come along and hit you. Take a look at Beethoven's notebooks --- a seemingly simple idea like the opening bars of the 5th symphony was actually the result of many, many revisions.
2. You have to practice your technique. It's hard work.
3. You should attempt things that are within the range of difficulty that your technique allows you to do competently.
4. Seek out people who know about your art form, and who are willing to tell you when you suck.
5. Over time, learn why those knowledgeable people think certain things suck, learn to detect and throw out your own failures, and eventually learn not to make those mistakes in the first place.

• book cover
  web page banner

Actually, having books online for browsing increases sales.
This is what has happened with the Baen Free Library, and it's also happened with my own books, and books from some some other publishers. It may not be universally true for every type of book, however. For instance, some college textbooks are so overpriced that students really are motivated strongly to photocopy them, etc. This book, for example, is $134, which is just insane.

I'm not a DNS guru, so can someone use crayons with me -- how do I actually go about registering my domains to support SPF on outgoing mail? There's this webapp for creating the text of the SPF record, but then what? Would the registrar have to provide a mechanism for me to add the record? The web host?

I'd be grateful if you could write a short review on The Assayer.

I run a web site that catalogs free books and accepts user-submitted reviews. The heat transfer book has been in the catalog for a while, and any user-submitted reviews of it would be appreciated!

I was interested to see the reference to her, because she's been cross-posting all her reviews in various places all over the net, including my own site, which catalogs and reviews free books. I didn't realize until I read the Times article yesterday that she was also posting them on Amazon, which is a big problem for me, because when you post a review on Amazon, they make you turn over your copyright to them. So I'm potentially liable for violating their copyright on my site. She did this despite some very clearly worded warnings on my site not to do that. Now she's started crapflooding my site with reviews containing false information. Really nice.

More info on my site. It's amazing what an ethical cesspool online book reviews (and movie reviews, and software reviews,...) are.

I was interested to see the reference to her, because she's been cross-posting all her reviews in various places all over the net, including my own site, which catalogs and reviews free books. I didn't realize until I read the Times article yesterday that she was also posting them on Amazon, which is a big problem for me, because when you post a review on Amazon, they make you turn over your copyright to them. So I'm potentially liable for violating their copyright on my site. She did this despite some very clearly worded warnings on my site not to do that. Now she's started crapflooding my site with reviews containing false information. Really nice.

More info on my site. It's amazing what an ethical cesspool online book reviews (and movie reviews, and software reviews,...) are.

In general, I have a problem with Raymond's pose as an anthropologist or sociologist of the open-source movement. Sociology and anthropology are supposed to be sciences, and scientists are supposed to try to be impartial and base things on empirical evidence, not preconceived beliefs. To me, Raymond's descriptions of the open-source culture read too much like a utopian fairy tale. The truth is that sometimes open source succeeds and sometimes it fails.

See The Assayer for a general catalog of free books.

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