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spork
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« on: December 02, 2011, 05:25:26 PM » |
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I've got temporary use of an iPad through the holidays and want to download some free books. Any recommendations? I prefer nonfiction because it takes me longer to read. My tastes run toward history (any epoch, though I'm most partial to contemporary and ancient; European medieval is not my thing), human evolution, anthropology. For example, I've never read Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in American Samoa, but probably should if it's anything like Theroux's Happy Isles of Oceania or Thompson's Curse of Lono.
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a.k.a. gum-chewing monkey in a Tufts University jacket
"Please do not force people who are exhausted to take medication for hallucinations." -- Memo from the Chair, Department of White Privilege Studies, Fiork University
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penthesilia
New member
Posts: 27
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« Reply #1 on: December 04, 2011, 09:32:56 AM » |
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Ipads and other tablet devices are great for catching up on ebooks and academic documents. I get many great reads from Gutenberg and ManyBooks myself.
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prof_cj
Still uses actual books for his gradebooks
Senior member
Posts: 274
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« Reply #2 on: December 07, 2011, 08:42:49 AM » |
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Google Books has some free stuff, usually random books out of order from series. I got one of Richard Stark's PARKER novels for free from Google books and I know there's usually surprise free stuff popping up there.
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professor_pat
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« Reply #3 on: December 07, 2011, 11:18:32 PM » |
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Bookmarking. Funny to find this thread just now, when I've finally sat down to download books for my upcoming trip. Thanks, Spork!
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To me, forums are more of a relaxing period in which the poster can allow himself or himself to be lost in a sea of wonder.
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seniorscholar
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« Reply #5 on: December 08, 2011, 06:32:36 PM » |
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Of course if you're interested in pre-1920 books (literary or otherwise), go to books.google.com, click on advanced search, choos "full view only," and feast on contents from US academic libraries, the New York Public, the British Library, the Bodleian, and a great many others. Most are downloadable in either pdf or epub format.For scholarly use I prefer pdf, because I want to see the scanned text, not the "translations" made by software with so-so ocr -- though that means you need a reader that handles pdf.
If you're outside the US, note: because of copyright issues, a lot of the 18th-19th century UK books and periodicals that are available to computers in the US can not be found on computers in the UK, Canada, Australia, etc. That's why scholars who can't easily get to good copyright libraries in the Commonwealth need friends in the US who can download things.
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spork
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« Reply #6 on: December 18, 2011, 08:53:24 PM » |
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Thanks for this. I downloaded a few books as pdfs. I discovered that the e-pub format of the Google Books versions usually contained many transcription errors from scanning/digitization. Some were close to unreadable. The pdfs were much much better. |
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a.k.a. gum-chewing monkey in a Tufts University jacket
"Please do not force people who are exhausted to take medication for hallucinations." -- Memo from the Chair, Department of White Privilege Studies, Fiork University
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conjugate
Compulsive punster and insatiable reader, and
Member-Moderator
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Posts: 17,026
Tends to have warped sense of humor
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« Reply #7 on: December 21, 2011, 11:40:14 PM » |
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Jerome K. Jerome is one of my favorites. You might look for any of a number of 19th-century translations of Greek and Roman historians, starting with Herodotus. I acknowledge that you've already read him, but he's surely worth a re-read.
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Unfortunately, I think conjugate gives good advice.
∀ε>0∃δ>0∋|x–a|<δ⇒|ƒ(x)-ƒ(a)|<ε |
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bioteacher
chocolate loving
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Posts: 3,743
Confused and sad. Or happy. I'm not sure...
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« Reply #9 on: January 01, 2012, 08:33:34 PM » |
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And every Friday, Barnes and Noble has a book for free. See this site for details. Some I have no interest in, others I am very interested in. Every month, the University of Chicago Press offers a free book. I subscribe and get an email from them. Details are here. |
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My work ethic is somewhere in Lake Buena Vista. I need to go look for it.
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neutralname
A person without qualities, except for being a
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« Reply #10 on: January 11, 2012, 04:39:56 PM » |
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Have you noticed how many free downloadable books there are, that are still in copyright? Quite a few academic books too.
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"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music." Vladimir Nabokov
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betty_p
Pissed off and wistful
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Ooh! Piece o' candy.
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« Reply #11 on: January 12, 2012, 10:53:08 PM » |
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And every Friday, Barnes and Noble has a book for free. See this site for details. Some I have no interest in, others I am very interested in. Every month, the University of Chicago Press offers a free book. I subscribe and get an email from them. Details are here.Thanks for this information! Also, there's bartleby.com for texts in the public domain. |
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But I'm not bitter.
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daniel_von_flanagan
<redacted>
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Works all day. Posts all night. Needs sleep.
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« Reply #12 on: February 21, 2012, 05:50:34 AM » |
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You can also get most of these older books through the non-profit archive.org, and not have the Google add your reading history to the list of things it is storing about you forever. - DvF
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The U.S. Education Department is establishing a new national research center to study colleges' ability to successfully educate the country's growing numbers of academically underprepared administrators.
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