Slashdot Mirror
New Science Books To Be Available Free Online
fm6 writes "Bloomsbury Publishing, best known for the Harry Potter books, has announced a new series of science books that will be available for free online. Bloomsbury thinks they can make enough money off of hard-copy sales to turn a 'small profit.' The online version will be covered by a Creative Commons license which allows free non-commercial use. They've already had some success with the one book they've published this way, Larry Lessig's 'Remix: Making Art and Commerce thrive in the Hybrid Economy.' The series, 'Science, Ethics and Innovation,' will be edited by Sir John Sulston, Nobel prize winner and one of the architects of the Human Genome Project."
Unless I'm mistaken, the Creative Commons Noncommercial licence allows you to charge a fee for the printing and distribution costs as long as it's not for profit. What's to stop some ant-capitalistic individual from setting up a non-commercial organisation to distribute the texts cheaper than Bloomsbury, thus preventing them making a profit?
I really like this, and shows that this company has a better understanding of the big picture when it comes to the dissemination of ideas. My question though is to the quality of these books. I've found often times text books to be poor presentations of science, either making it boring, inaccurate, or just a poor presentation in general. Though quality aside, I still applaud their efforts to make knowledge more freely available.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
Go to any used book store and grab an algebra, calculus, whatever textbook for $5. Basic math hasn't changed in a hundred years, so it's not like you're getting out dated material. In fact, text books have been dumbed down in recent years, so you're probably getting a better education that way.
This is how I learned calculus in high school, and then totally slept through it in college, making As.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
A free introductory Calculus book (a CC license):
http://www.math.wisc.edu/~keisler/calc.html
There is a free complex analysis book:
http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~r-ash/CV.html
A free algebraic topology book:
http://www.math.cornell.edu/~hatcher/#ATI
Wikipedia has lots of math articles that are very useful for some purposes. I'd be interested if anybody knows of any other resources.
If you just need "cheap", Dover publications puts out lots of inexpensive math books ($10-$20 for material that could be $100+ elsewhere). Google for their website or just check Amazon. Note though that these are mostly older books, which means, for the most part, that they are much more rigorous than current books.
Be aware that if by "algebra" you mean elementary algebra (what you learn in middle/high school), algebra means something different to mathematicians, so a textbook on algebra may not be what you want.
Go to any used book store and grab an algebra, calculus, whatever textbook for $5. Basic math hasn't changed in a hundred years, so it's not like you're getting out dated material.
Not a bad idea. But watch out for those textbooks made in the 1860s. I heard that some of them will try to tell you that 2+2=goat.
I expect that Bloomsbury will indeed make a small profit.
There are many books that are sold profitably even though their contents is available in its entirety online and is redistributable. Project Gutenberg has the complete works of Shakespeare online, a text in the public domain that anyone can print. Yet thousands of print copies of these works are sold through bookstores every month. The same can be said of other classic works now in the public domain, as well as some editions of the Bible, and most classical music scores.
I believe this situation is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Unlike audio and video recordings, which by their nature require some type of playback device, books are self-contained and offer certain advantages over even the most advanced and unrestricted reading device.
It is still considered non-commercial use if you use these books to teach kids science, then sell the kids?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
Also I got some book (I think published in the mid 80s or so - at least there was a year in the title) which tried to teach me that 2+2=5.
Caused me a lot of problems, that did.
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
You're post was doing okay until your true motives of bragging about how great you are were revealed in the last sentence.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
If you go to the National Academy Press web site, http://www.nap.edu/about.html, you will find that many of their books are available in PDF format, and that many of those can be downloaded for free. To find what you are interested in, use the search box in the upper left hand side of their about page. Since we taxpayers paid for most, if not all, of the work being presented, perhaps they all should be free.
I measure my fuel efficiency in rods per hogshead- the way god intended.
If it's not .epub, they're not very good. Why? It's industry accepted, prevalent open-standard for ebooks. Even Adobe uses it over .pdf.
Question everything
It's "He IS post." Jeeze, don't you know anything about grammar?
Would you mind explaining the distinction?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebra:
Elementary algebra is often part of the curriculum in secondary education and provides an introduction to the basic ideas of algebra, including effects of adding and multiplying numbers, the concept of variables, definition of polynomials, along with factorization and determining their roots.
Algebra is much broader than elementary algebra and can be generalized. In addition to working directly with numbers, algebra covers working with symbols, variables, and set elements. Addition and multiplication are viewed as general operations, and their precise definitions lead to structures such as groups, rings and fields.
Scan through the section on abstract algebra farther down the page.
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In all this talk of who can do what under which license...has anyone stopped to think of the children? You have? Oh...okay. Carry on.
Sorry about the mess.
Warning: The Keisler calculus book you mention uses what's called "nonstandard analysis", involving "hyperreal numbers", and is very different from what you learn in most calculus courses. This isn't to say that it is a bad book - in fact it is a very good one. But nonstandard analysis, while valid, hasn't really caught on since it was invented by Robinson in the 1960s in spite of some vocal advocates. Just be aware that after this book, some of the things in the ordinary high school or college Calculus-I book are going to be unfamiliar. And while rote manipulations with hyperreal numbers aren't too hard to learn, to understand them rigorously involves abstract math and set theory much deeper than that needed for the real numbers and limits of standard calculus (see the Epilogue of the book).
If you really and truly support open access to books and information then buy these books.
This is the content industry finally hearing those of us who have protested to the industry attempting to lock down content and refuse to update their business models to embrace modern copying technology instead of fighting it.
If you don't recognize this as a pilot project to test the waters you are a fool. Everyone buy at book in this series, even if you don't really want the thing. Consider it a donation to the principle and vote with your dollars.