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Springer Textbooks More Than 10 Years Old Available for Free Legal Download

link.springer.com

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Re: Springer Textbooks More Than 10 Years Old Available for Free Legal Download

#81
post #6

Is there some sort of announcement from Springer about this? Specifically, one in which they state what the license is, e.g., CC-BY or CC-BY-SA or something like that? I'll bet they attached either the No-Derivs (ND) or Non-Commercial (NC) limitations, though -- would love to be wrong about that. In the PDFs I've looked at so far, they didn't bother to change the copyright statement at the front of the book, so they…

From http://www.springeropen.com/books > SpringerOpen books are published under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC) license, so they can be reused and redistributed for non-commercial purposes as long as the original author is attributed.

SpringerOpen is not what's being talking about here. There are only a few dozen books listed in that page. I don't think any of the books being referenced in the comments is there.

Re: Springer Textbooks More Than 10 Years Old Available for Free Legal Download

#82

One of the things I've realized just a few days ago was that we need better technology to absorb content efficiently. There are so many books out there that I want to read, but might never be able to read because I will not have enough time. It would be amazing if there was just a way to download a book and understand its contents right into my brain in a matter of minutes.

What is the status of that speed reading app? It would display each word in the middle of the screen if I remember correctly, and by that way you could speed up reading a lot. I don't remember the name. Maybe not recommended for a good novel, and I don't know if it would really help in reading a book with difficult content, but still.

Re: Springer Textbooks More Than 10 Years Old Available for Free Legal Download

#86

so are retailers like amazon just going to carry on selling these books, for in some cases hundreds of dollars, without any notice that you can get it for free, albeit only digitally?

offcourse not, retailers are very sensitive to matters of ethics like this.

Re: Springer Textbooks More Than 10 Years Old Available for Free Legal Download

#87
post #82

One of the things I've realized just a few days ago was that we need better technology to absorb content efficiently. There are so many books out there that I want to read, but might never be able to read because I will not have enough time. It would be amazing if there was just a way to download a book and understand its contents right into my brain in a matter of minutes.

What is the status of that speed reading app? It would display each word in the middle of the screen if I remember correctly, and by that way you could speed up reading a lot. I don't remember the name. Maybe not recommended for a good novel, and I don't know if it would really help in reading a book with difficult content, but still.

Reading speed is rarely the bottleneck in reading textbooks, just as typing speed is rarely the bottleneck in coding. In fact, I found that strictly limiting my reading speed, e.g. by forcing myself to spend at least two minutes on a page before turning over, has greatly helped me to understand texts better and more thoroughly.

Actually, novels are the only part where I could see some value from speed-reading, as the plot is usually not all that difficult to follow and at least in most cases the language not nice enough to marvel at it, though I suppose the latter is what you meant by “good novel”.

Re: Springer Textbooks More Than 10 Years Old Available for Free Legal Download

#88
post #46

Some good CS books that I found: Approximation Algorithms http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-04565-7 How to Solve It: Modern Heuristics http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-07807-5 Modern Graph Theory http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-0619-4 Computational Geometry http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-03427-9

From Newton to Mandelbrot http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-86780-4 shows how to use small tractable computer simulations to understand Physics.

Modern Heuristics is in my top-k books of all time. Check out Zbigniew Michalewicz's other books @ http://cs.adelaide.edu.au/~zbyszek/books.html

Re: Springer Textbooks More Than 10 Years Old Available for Free Legal Download

#90
post #68

One of the things I've realized just a few days ago was that we need better technology to absorb content efficiently. There are so many books out there that I want to read, but might never be able to read because I will not have enough time. It would be amazing if there was just a way to download a book and understand its contents right into my brain in a matter of minutes.

Matter of minutes might never be possible or even desirable. But I do think learning can be done much more efficiently with the right tools. Working on that on my side projects ;) It comes down to good old note taking and expressing what you have learned in your own words or code.

One technique I have been thinking of is to use AI/NLP to automatically generate questions from the text. It might not know the answer, but it doesn't have it.
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