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

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

#151

Post by swsieber »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #147
bluenose69 wrote: post #139

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

That makes me wonder if after hitting a certain threshold in popularity they convert it from free to paid content.

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

#152

Post by JadeNB »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #144
jacquesm wrote: post #55

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.

To be fair, although they are both way, way behind, Elsevier and Springer both have a surprising amount of material available for free online. (I don't say this with any relevant examples to hand, but rather as a mathematician who is often surprised that I don't need to use my university proxy to access an article.)

I also think that Springer deserves serious credit for their commitment to reasonable e-book publication: once you have access, you download the PDF and you have it; no DRM, no special reader software. So many other e-publishing sites want to make sure that I can't actually read their files that this straightforward approach is a relief.

With that said, I am bummed that I missed this apparent window of opportunity!

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

#153

Post by NotOscarWilde »

impendia wrote: post #149
bluenose69 wrote: post #139

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?

I am not an expert either, but it is unlikely you ever had the right to share the files in any way, especially as it seems the error had still the standard license, but with cost of 0.00.

I am quite annoyed by this revert -- especially by the fact that big publishers can generate so much good will just by a simple error that gets shared on the Internet, while the correction will get minimal exposure.

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

#154

Post by benkie »

kevindeasis wrote: post #32

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.

That's what the idea behind IBM Watson is, because he can read much faster than any human and you can ask him anything without knowing anything about it yourself and he will give you an answer based on all books and scientific papers he was able to read until that point...only problems are a) you have to trust the evaluation and conclusions of a computer (better the programmer of the algorithms maybe) because b) probably nobody can verify the definite correctness or wrongness of an answer, because nobody has been able to study and to read as much about a topic as him. Exciting technology that is. And exciting times we are living in where computers start "knowing" more about any given topic than a human is able to about one single area and starts answering our questions about them...!

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

#155

Post by jacquesm »

JadeNB wrote: post #152
jrochkind1 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair, although they are both way, way behind, Elsevier and Springer both have a surprising amount of material available for free online. (I don't say this with any relevant examples to hand, but rather as a mathematician who is often surprised that I don't need to use my university proxy to access an article.) I also think that Springer deserves serious credit for their commitment to reasonable e-book publicati…

I got a book about Ted Nelson out of it and I don't feel like a pirate :) Wished it had lasted a little longer though, I had an hour and a half conference call and I figured I was going to spend some time tonight looking over the computer section to get some 'light reading' for the new year. Springer has a hard time competing on price with the amount of free stuff that is floating around on the net, but the quality of their bookshelf is very high and this was the closest we ever got to having an actual library online, even if only for 2 hours. It'd be interesting to see which books were downloaded by the whole community.

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

#156

Post by datihein »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #147
bluenose69 wrote: post #139

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

Those links are to "Open Access" books and have always, I believe, been free (as in beer).

The content identified by the original post were not open access; they were paid access (typically quite expensive) and published in 2004 or before.

I hope the zero cost downloads was not a glitch but a policy, and that Springer will make those older texts freely available again.

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

#157

Post by praseodym »

bluenose69 wrote: post #139

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…

Through my university network the books are still available (and have been for years). Might also be an interesting option for anyone living near a university with an open library.

OP link lists 66,327 results (i.e. books) available free of cost.

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

#158

Post by petke »

datihein wrote: post #156
ComodoHacker wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Those links are to "Open Access" books and have always, I believe, been free (as in beer). The content identified by the original post were not open access; they were paid access (typically quite expensive) and published in 2004 or before. I hope the zero cost downloads was not a glitch but a policy, and that Springer will make those older texts freely available again.

I hope nobody gets fired for this. Probably a lots of these leaked books will be up on torrent sites.

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

#159

Post by jforman »

impendia wrote: post #149
bluenose69 wrote: post #139

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?

Depends on what license was communicated with the books when you downloaded them (or that is in the books themselves).

If there's no license specified, default is "all rights reserved" and you cannot distribute the books to your students free of liability.

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

#160

Post by [deleted] »

vilius wrote: post #138
kevindeasis wrote: post #32

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…

[deleted]
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