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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

#143

Looks like another good collection for archive.org to back up... ;-) The site works without Javascript and contains direct links to PDFs, which is an unexpected bonus in this age of single-page JS apps and DRM. Very nice. I wonder if the 2005 ones will also become free in 2016?

It won't be archived because of the robots.txt

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

#144

Thank you Nate, that is the best link of HN for the year. I'm seriously impressed with Springer for doing this. Who is next, Elsevier?

It looks like it was a mistake?

Now I'm imagining a Yes Men style hack where we release a P.R. apparently from Elsevier where they make all of their backfiles open access because of the social good it would do.

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

#146
post #138

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.

Last time I had to absorb content efficiently I went for Kindle and their text-to-speech set at faster pace. I followed the robot's voice by reading the book myself and writing down a summary sentence / keywords per every page read. This way it took me a day (from early morning to late night) to read a 400 pages long Lawrence Lessig's "Code 2" and write a review. Next day I managed to get highest score at the relevan…

> It kind of makes sense that reading + writing + listening allows one to deeply absorb content and probably is the best combination so far.

This is probably one of the best ideas I read on HN this year. It just seems to match up very well with my own study experiences, and the advice I have read recently in 'A Mind for Numbers' http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G3L19ZU

Thanks, I shall try this!

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

#147

Access seems to have been cut off about 2 hours ago. Presumably this was a mistake, but new-year optimists might hope that Springer did this on purpose, to gauge the market at low cost. As someone with a full-time job, I'd be happy to pay $10 to $20 to download an old book that might come in handy, but with conventional download costs being half the paper cost, I balk and just walk over to the university library so I…

Many books are indeed available for free download (including non-CS books), but most of the ones linked in this thread aren't.

Examples of working links: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-5927-5 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-6131-5 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-0100-8

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

#148
Does anyone have any list of "must-have" book recommendations for those who have access? Books that explain technical topics well? I'm thinking of topics ranging numerical simulation to ODEs to optimization to spectral graph theory to parsing etc.

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

#149

Access seems to have been cut off about 2 hours ago. Presumably this was a mistake, but new-year optimists might hope that Springer did this on purpose, to gauge the market at low cost. As someone with a full-time job, I'd be happy to pay $10 to $20 to download an old book that might come in handy, but with conventional download costs being half the paper cost, I balk and just walk over to the university library so I…

I am not an expert on copyright law -- do you (or anyone) know to what extent I am legally allowed to share the books I downloaded from Springer's website while I could?

In particular, I am teaching a course this spring based on two Springer books that I was able to download yesterday. If I e-mail PDFs to all of my students, am I legally in the clear?

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