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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.
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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.
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?
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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.