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Springer Textbooks More Than 10 Years Old Available for Free Legal Download
- dang 11y agoThis was discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10800881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10800881, but another thread seems like a good idea, so more people can know about this. The intellectual riches available here are incredible.
- jacquesm 11y agoI missed the first round, super happy to see this.
- kickingvegas 11y ago"Formulas, Facts and Constants for Students and Professionals in Engineering, Chemistry, and Physics" by Helmut and Kurt Fischbeck. Just download it now and thank me later. http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-72555-5 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-72555-5
- preordained 11y agoGold! God bless you, sir!
- msie 11y agoSooo many good books! I'm exhausted! Here are some good ones: MPEG Video Compression Standard: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b115884 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b115884 Chaos and Fractals: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97624 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97624 Proofs from THE BOOK: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-05412-3 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-05412-3 Joel on Software: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-0753-5 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-0753-5 Programming Challenges: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97559 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97559
- userbinator 11y agoIf you are interested in the first one, I'd recommend this too: Data Compression http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97635 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97635
- zappo2938 11y agoThe Things You Should Never Do, Part One by Joel Spolsky should be mandatory reading for every tech executive.[1] Springer might add more value to the texts by enabling Medium style side comments on an HTML version for readers to either ask for help or for experts to clarify and extend. Use the job posting business model to post jobs in the comments in specific disciplines of the texts to create revenue. [1] http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4302-0753-5_24 http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4302-0753-5_2...
- frik 11y agoChapter 4, page 313 is quite an interesting read (2000 vs 2015 point of view) The corrected link from page 316 (bottom) - hilarious: http://web.archive.org/web/20001203002400/http://microsoft.com/business/vision/netwhitepaper.asp http://web.archive.org/web/20001203002400/http://microsoft.c... Page 325 talks about the porting effort which didn't work out, and the Wasabi language was born: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FogBugz#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FogBugz#History
- jcl 11y agoHere's the original blog post, for anyone who was interested in reading it after Springer decided to reinstate its $30-per-chapter charge: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html (While I know they charge like this for most of their e-books, this particular example is embarrassing.)
- stplsd 11y agoMPEG Video Compression Standard: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b115884 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b115884 It says restricted to me and offers me to buy chapter for $29.95 and whole book for $229.00
- jboggan 11y agoThank you, this made my time period. "Graphs and Networks (Transfinite and Nonstandard)" woo-hoo!
- sridharpoduri 11y agothis announcement made my holidays even more wonderful. all i need now is sneak into a corner and start soaking up this treasure trove of knowledge.
- graycat 11y agoI downloaded the HTML of the page. Out in the middle of the text is a really simple version of the full list easy to work with in an editor. I got a list of the PDFs I'd like (basically nearly all the analysis and applied math and nearly none of the algebra or topology, and set up a script with the famous CURL to do the downloads to file names I'd picked out, etc. But their Web server rejected, "closed", all the CURL connections. I tried some really simple software I had based just on sockets, and those connections were closed also. My Web browser connects and downloads the file one at a time just fine. So, maybe I need a newer version of CURL that looks more like a Web browser? Or just use Firefox, manually, one PDF at a time. Bummer.
- kevindeasis 11y agoOne 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.
- bewe42 11y agoMatter 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.
- sitkack 11y agoOne 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.
- restalis 11y agoThe technology is evolving in that way, sort of. We have tools for content analysis and one of such analysis is text summarization. It would be extremely useful if text summarizators would become developed enough to be of any practical use. To be able to easily create a summary for the entire book, then if you're interested - for the individual chapters, and so on, each time in various volume/detail according to your time constraint and degree of interest. Pretty much like a zoom function you do on a very high resolution image.
- rogeryu 11y agoWhat 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.
- steinsgate 11y agoMost of these books were already available for free (but not legal) download at Library Genesis http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/
- iamcreasy 11y agoAaron Swartz would be really happy if he heard this news.
- raverbashing 11y agoFor theoretical purposes, unless you're working at the very edge of the state-of-the-art, a book 10 years old is as good as new Besides Machine Learning and some niche topics most books on the list should be very useful and applicable
- pmiller2 11y agoBest of all, you can use Lulu.com or a similar service to print them if you want nice hardcopies. :)
- ScottBurson 11y agoSome of these aren't very old at all! E.g.: Intertwingled, about Ted Nelson, 2014: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-16925-5 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-16925-5
- conistonwater 11y agoSolving Ordinary Differential Equations II by Hairer and Wanner: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-05221-7 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-05221-7
- isb 11y agoThank you! Since the browsing experience on Springer is not very friendly, here is a link to all the old Springer titles in Amazon's catalog: Springer: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_b/?search-alias=stripbooks&unfiltered=1&field-keywords=&field-author=&field-title=&field-isbn=&field-publisher=springer&node=&field-p_n_condition-type=&p_n_feature_browse-bin=&field-subject=&field-language=&field-dateop=before&field-datemod=1&field-dateyear=2006&sort=relevanceexprank&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.x=23&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.y=17 http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_b/?search-alias=s... Apress: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_b/?search-alias=stripbooks&unfiltered=1&field-keywords=&field-author=&field-title=&field-isbn=&field-publisher=apress&node=&field-p_n_condition-type=&p_n_feature_browse-bin=&field-subject=&field-language=&field-dateop=before&field-datemod=1&field-dateyear=2006&sort=relevanceexprank&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.x=33&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.y=8 http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_b/?search-alias=s...
- zump 11y agoWhy is there no announcement by Springer on this?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- xt00 11y agowow this is pretty awesome
- copperx 11y agoAny suggestions?
- kfogel 11y agoIs 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 still all appear to be under traditional restrictive copyright, whatever new terms Springer intends notwithstanding. -Karl
- teachingaway 11y agoyeah, it looks like they are still under traditional copyright. It's just that the purchase price is $0.00. Free as in beer. Still, that's pretty cool!
- kfogel 11y agoWell, right now it's still technically illegal to download them, unless & until Springer actually says some different license. Not that anyone would be prosecuted, obviously; one could clearly claim that it was obvious that Springer intended to distribute them at the very least for personal non-commercial use, even if Springer didn't say so explicitly anywhere. If the terms are even more liberal than that, so much the better... But it ain't so till Springer says it's so :-).
- ternaryoperator 11y agoOne of the best of these is Holub on Patterns [1], which is IMO the best book for learning patterns. How to implement patterns, how to know which ones to use where, and how to use them in combination. Excellent, clear tutorial. Implementation language is Java. [1] http://goo.gl/DKFzCe http://goo.gl/DKFzCe
- shoo 11y agoSlight tangent: if one is interested in design patterns, consider reading the book "A Pattern Language", 1977 by Christopher Alexander et al. It's the original patterns book, for architecture. Continuing tangent: if that sounds interesting, please consider also reading the precursor book "The Timeless Way of Building" by Christopher Alexander. It focuses on the theory and the philosophy. This is a beautiful book, in both senses of the beauty of the book itself, and the beauty of the ideas contained inside. It is very humane. "There is one timeless way of building. It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has always been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. And as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form as the trees and hills,and as our faces are." It wouldn't hurt to have more humane and beautiful things in the world, particularly those that are designed and built and customised by those who must inhabit or use them. Whether those things are buildings, or software, or laws, or societal goals. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0195024028 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0195024028 http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheTimelessWayOfBuilding http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheTimelessWayOfBuilding
- 8ig8 11y agoFilter for all books published in English at least 10 years ago (downloadable), newest first: http://link.springer.com/search?facet-content-type=%22Book%22&date-facet-mode=between&facet-end-year=2005&facet-language=%22En%22&showAll=false&facet-start-year=1815 http://link.springer.com/search?facet-content-type=%22Book%2...
- scarmig 11y ago"Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics", published at least 10 years ago. Higher signal to noise if you're just looking to pick up some field of mathematics. http://link.springer.com/search?facet-series=%22666%22&facet-content-type=%22Book%22&date-facet-mode=between&facet-start-year=1958&previous-start-year=1958&facet-end-year=2004&previous-end-year=2015 http://link.springer.com/search?facet-series=%22666%22&facet...
- pmiller2 11y agoThe mere sight of a yellow and white book cover takes me back to my graduate school days anymore. :-)
- vishnugupta 11y agoThank you and thank you Springer! You just made my personal day and ruined my office day :-). I'll now spend rest of the day, and perhaps week, drooling over, downloading (and uploading them to my DropBox account) a whole bunch of these :-)
- bobo123 11y agoThis is great - I've been looking for a good series to have on hand when I want to dive deeper into a math field on an as-needed basis. For example, the Linear Algebra one could be really useful if I decide to get deeper into any Machine Learning stuff - http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-1670-4 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-1670-4 It's possible to do things with statistics/ML even without having the greatest grasp on linear algebra, but it sure would help to have a firmer foundation. Thanks!
- gaurangagrawal 11y agoThis is so amazing. Thanks for sharing. Computer Science books before 2005 can be found using: http://link.springer.com/search?facet-content-type=%22Book%22&date-facet-mode=between&facet-end-year=2005&facet-language=%22En%22&previous-start-year=1960&sortOrder=newestFirst&showAll=false&previous-end-year=2016&facet-start-year=1995&facet-discipline=%22Computer+Science%22 http://link.springer.com/search?facet-content-type=%22Book%2...
- ihaveajob 11y agoI'm getting 0 results. Is that so?
- codyb 11y agoVery cool. They've got one book in Italian, and I just started learning, maybe after my easy Berlitz, I'll try to learn some Italian and refresh some Mathematics at the same time.
- calvins 11y agoMy favorite find so far is "Advances in Crypto" conference proceedings going back to the early eighties: - http://link.springer.com/search?query=%22advances+in+cryptology%22&showAll=false http://link.springer.com/search?query=%22advances+in+cryptol...
- dchest 11y agoCrypto thread is here! - The Design of Rijndael http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-04722-4 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-04722-4
- dchest 11y agoThe book is still available for free from the authors: http://jda.noekeon.org/#RijndaelBook http://jda.noekeon.org/#RijndaelBook
- anujdeshpande 11y agoThis is pure money. Thanks for the link OP !
- BorisMelnik 11y agoAmazing! Right off the bad I found some great topics: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-6383-8 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-6383-8 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-30241-1 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-30241-1 Looked like great reads right off the bad. Thanks OP!
- forgotten_pw 11y agoMaybe you already know this, but I think the phrase you're looking for is "right off the bat". I'm not really sure where it comes from though. Just thought you might want some stranger on the internet to correct your usage of idioms (seriously though; I'm not trying to be a dick, just trying to share some knowledge).
- bcook 11y agoBetter to learn mistakes sooner rather than later. Damned ego makes it tough either way though...
- bewe42 11y agobaseball analogy?
- forgotten_pw 11y agoYes! Thank you. I've never really thought about the phrase, despite having used it (probably) hundreds of times.
- rswier 11y agoSearched for "Compiler" and was not disappointed. Tim Budd's "An APL Compiler" is a classic. I love the goofy title of Mads Tofte's: "Compiler Generators What They Can Do, What They Might Do, and What They Will Probably Never Do" Paid a handsome amount for these and many others at Reiter's Books back in the day!
- spopejoy 11y agoIt's insane the ebook costs $89.
- mturmon 11y agoLarry Wasserman's All of Statistics is there at http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-21736-9 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-21736-9. Optimization by Lange is at http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4757-4182-7 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4757-4182-7 Time Series Analysis and Its Applications by Shumway and Stoffer (http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4757-3261-0 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4757-3261-0), who developed the EM tools for fitting state space models to time series by maximum likelihood, but were largely uncredited by the NIPS crowd.
- isb 11y agoSome good CS books that I found: Approximation Algorithms http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-04565-7 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 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 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 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-03427-9
- tdsamardzhiev 11y agoAlso Skiena's "Algorithm Design Manual" will be available in 2018 :)
- sitkack 11y agoFrom Newton to Mandelbrot http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-86780-4 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 http://cs.adelaide.edu.au/~zbyszek/books.html
- signa11 11y ago> Check out Zbigniew Michalewicz's other books @ ... thank you ! this led me to his books on evolution programs (Genetic Algorithms + Data Structures = Evolutionary Programs), which is an excellent book as well.
- sytelus 11y agoIf you get so excited by limited set of old book, here's something that will keep you awake for many many nights: https://www.safaribooksonline.com/ https://www.safaribooksonline.com/ For couple of $100 bucks you can get unlimited access to virtually every CS/tech book out there. This include brand new ones and even exclusive access to books with future publish date.
- ColbyJackRat 11y agoYou know, you seem pretty out of touch. You are comparing something free with a service that costs "couple of $100 bucks", more specifically $400/year for a subscription. If $400 is so little to you that you can just toss it aside that's all well and good, but that is not the case for a lot of people.. most of whom the subject of this post is aimed.
- dhoe 11y ago400$/y is not much for what you get from Safari books, and it's a minor expense for many professionals in the first world.
- deelowe 11y agoHow is this even remotely the same? Most of the Safari catalog isn't textbooks and it's $400 (a couple would be 200 btw) a year.
- asddubs 11y agoa couple doesn't necessarily mean two, depending on where you are from. it can also be synonymous with "a few"
- ksherlock 11y agoMy local library card gives me full access to safari. Might be worth checking if yours does, too. ACM membership also gives access to a subset of safari.
- jetskindo 11y agoIn times like these I realize I just can't read all I want to read. There is so much it's overwhelming.
- jacquesm 11y agoRead what you need. The rest will be there when you need it too... It's like being given an 'all you can eat' card with indefinite lifetime, only in this context the card should probably read 'all you can read' :)
- jacquesm 11y agoThank 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?
- jrochkind1 11y agoIt 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.
- JadeNB 11y agoTo 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!
- jacquesm 11y agoI 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.
- zaf 11y agoThis is simply fantastic. I'm sure all publishers will follow. +1 to Springer. Here is my current read: Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-05642-4 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-05642-4
- zaf 11y agoWell it's understandable. While most of us are in the middle of holidays theres some poor soul beavering away trying to implement some feature before the "end of the year" deadline and tapped the wrong combination of keys and bam! the bank account graph starts dipping and crap hits the fan. Hey, why don't you read some of the theoretical security / programming books that your company publishes? -11 to Springer.
- bewe42 11y agoThis is so awesome. Makes and ruins my day. I'm wondering what that means for authors and writing technical books in general though. Have authors a say in this?
- vidarh 11y agoTechnical subjects are probably the best possible to do this in for both publishers and authors - especially textbooks quickly depreciate in monetary value, but they'll gain a lot of extra exposure for authors and newer titles. I'm sure they have some classics where they'll lose some sales, but most of these titles will have been superseded by newer books or subsequent editions of the same books long ago.
- kanche 11y agoWoah, it's a treasure trove! I am definitely checking out some of the books mentioned in the thread :) Unfortunately, some of the old and gold Springer books are available only in paper format like Shreve's Stochastic Calculus for Finance [0]. [0] http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9780387401003 http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9780387401003
- jeffwass 11y agoFYI, Shreve's "Brownian Motion and Stochastic Calculus" book is available : http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4684-0302-2 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4684-0302-2
- paulojreis 11y agoOh, crap. What you have done... How am I supposed to leave the house, now? :) BTW: found this gem for brain-science junkies: http://rd.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-79928-0 http://rd.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-79928-0 - Neurobiology of Decision-Making, edited by Damásio, Damásio & Christen (the first "Damásio" is António Damásio, author of "Descartes' Error").
- lottin 11y agoFor R users this book is a classic: Modern Applied Statistics with S http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-21706-2 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-21706-2
- sitkack 11y agoI really wish the ACM would do this, even if it was +15 years.
- userbinator 11y agoLooks 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?
- rgawdzik 11y agoIt won't be archived because of the robots.txt
- DanBC 11y agoBeauty of Fractals: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-61717-1 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-61717-1 Chaos and Fractals: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97624 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97624
- xerophyte12932 11y agoI love how you can download individual chapters instead of the entire book
- yomritoyj 11y agoMy selected and slightly annotated list, primarily probability and statistics https://www.jyotirmoy.net/posts/2015-12-29-springer-openaccess.html https://www.jyotirmoy.net/posts/2015-12-29-springer-openacce...
- JohnHammersley 11y agoWhat a great announcement for the end of the year :) +1 to msie's recommendation to read Chaos & Fractals (http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97624 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97624)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- bitL 11y agoCan somebody please download them all and seed them?
- rincebrain 11y agoThat does not seem to currently be legal under the T&C, unfortunately.
- cube00 11y agoAFAIK, they are still covered by copyright (they are just being sold for $0.00; so free as in beer) so we won't necessarily have the right to redistribute in any way we might like unless explicitly allowed.
- siscia 11y agoSome of you can point out some interesting book about distributed system ? There are a lot of books about the subject but I don't know if those books are valid...
- DrNuke 11y agoThat's good for fundamentals but most of the applied science is inevitably out of date. Would not waste too much time searching dustbins, then: trying novelty is more intriguing.
- fithisux 11y agoSchneider's "Verification of Reactive Systems" is there and yuuummy.
- enkephalin 11y agoso 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?
- Conjoiner 11y agooffcourse not, retailers are very sensitive to matters of ethics like this.
- vive-la-liberte 11y agoHow long will they remain accessible for download? Hopefully indefinitely. I'm on vacation. Crossing my fingers I'll be able to download them when I get home.
- jarmitage 11y agoInteresting books with >4 star Amazon ratings: The Meaning of Relativity (Einstein) http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-011-6022-3 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-011-6022-3 Centauri Dreams: Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4757-3894-0 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4757-3894-0 The Physics of Musical Instruments http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-21603-4 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-21603-4 Introduction to Nanoscale Science and Technology http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b119185 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b119185 Scanning Electron Microscopy and X-ray Microanalysis http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4615-0215-9 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4615-0215-9 Structures or Why Things Don't Fall Down http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4615-9074-3 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4615-9074-3 Fundamentals of Power Electronics http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b100747 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b100747 Advanced Organic Chemistry A/B http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b114222 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b114222 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b114293 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b114293 Principles of Terrestrial Ecosystem Ecology http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97397 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97397
- yarapavan 11y agoFor those who are interested in these kind of programs, please see directory of open access books (DOAB) site - http://www.doabooks.org/doab?func=subject&uiLanguage=en http://www.doabooks.org/doab?func=subject&uiLanguage=en
- singularity7 11y agowow
- singularity7 11y agowow
- wycx 11y agoWill we see the same thing from Elsevier?
- HelloNurse 11y agoNo.
- LittlePeter 11y agoThe fun is over. There are only 135 books available now instead of 56,000.
- nikkev 11y agoYeah, most of the books I attempted to download were restricted.
- adaml_623 11y agoWell there are prices appearing now for me in the UK so apparently those freebies weren't intentional. sad
- bombita 11y agoSame here. I tried one hour ago and could get one and now is all "Get Access" Bad Springer :(
- gagagababa 11y agoI'm in UK as well and everything was working just fine up until ~15 minutes ago.
- ioltas 11y agoThis may be something decided depending on your geographic position where author's or editor's rights are differently being applied then.. From where I am I can get a "Download Book" button.
- nikkev 11y agoNot sure about that, just checked a link from a book that I had downloaded previously (this morning) and the download option was no longer there.
- _Codemonkeyism 11y agoSame here (Germany), saw this in the morning, wanted to download after lunch, doesn't work anymore.
- marincounty 11y agoIt ended for my IP. Don't know if they set a limit of books per IP, or it just ended? 4:53 a.m. Pacific time. Good while it lasted.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- RBerenguel 11y agoAccess is no longer open (at least not from my side)... I guess it was some bug at Springer? A pity.
- CurtMonash 11y agoHuh? I'm seeing 135 books there, total, including 4 in math. Springer actually seems to offer >19,000 math books. Is that the correct link? What am I missing?
- stats_lly 11y agoSame here - was seeing 59 pages of stats books this morning, and only 2 books are in stats now.
- pablooa 11y agoAnyone managed to crawl the site before prices appeared again? :P
- datihein 11y agoI'm now seeing "Get Access" (i.e., pay money) instead of "Download Book". I wonder if Springer shut this down? Or if there is some quantity or rate limit on the downloads?
- diffraction 11y agoWhile this may have been true when it was posted it is no longer true. If you think about it the idea doesn't make sense because the still living authors still want a cut. It's unfortunate because it's very difficult to find good textbooks just by searching yourself because the prices are so high.
- nikkev 11y agoI don't buy the idea that the authors all still want a "cut" so to speak, given that many authors (at least in statistics) make copies freely available on their websites. I know Shumway did with the time series text and I beleive Lasserman did as well.
- gte525u 11y agoIt may just be the site getting hammered. I'm seeing my searches limited to 2011-Present even though I'm searching 1990-Present.
- icebraining 11y agoSounds more like they just hid them until they have a proper fix.
- tremon 11y agoWhat are the odds this change was made in error? i.e. someone pruning a database, only to have the website logic interpret that as "free" ?
- elorant 11y agoSeems like demand was so high they had to kill it. I guess that’s what happens when you hit first page of HN, there must have been thousands of geeks downloading books by the dozens. Well it was good while it lasted. Managed to download a few books. Better luck next time/year.
- iamleppert 11y agoUmm, what happened? I clicked on a few of those titles below and its asking me to PAY!!! :( Information should be free.
- shadowfax92 11y agocan someone share links of best CS books meeting this criteria?
- bluenose69 11y agoAccess 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 can copy the 5 pages I actually need in the book.
- ComodoHacker 11y agoMany 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/10.1007/978-1-4302-5927-5 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-6131-5 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-6131-5 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-0100-8 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-0100-8
- swsieber 11y agoThat makes me wonder if after hitting a certain threshold in popularity they convert it from free to paid content.
- datihein 11y agoThose 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.
- petke 11y agoI hope nobody gets fired for this. Probably a lots of these leaked books will be up on torrent sites.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jjtheblunt 11y agoThe title seems false: it's easy to find Lecture Notes in Mathematics titles more than 10 years old which are pay only.
- baby 11y agoThis is awesome! Does anyone know about cryptography in Springer? Any good 10 year old textbooks I should get?
- wfunction 11y agoDoes 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.
- rswier 11y agoOnce again the internet has demonstrated it's ability to (semi-)autonomously heal damage and mis-configuration by replicating data from the faulty nodes. I trust the keepers of this valuable data will occasionally admire and validate these backups, replicate sparingly, and never profit except to enrich their knowledge. Guilty twinges may be eased by giving back to the nearest struggling technical book store in your area :)
- vram22 11y agoThis thread could be useful even if the Springer action was a mistake (or whatever) and the free books download facility has been withdrawn - because many people have mentioned book titles that they like. I, for one, was not aware of many of these titles, and my guess is that many others would be in the same position. So this thread is a useful resource. It would be great if readers who can, could vote this thread up for a day or two at least, so it stays visible until people get a bit of time to copy book titles to check out or buy later. Thanks.
- hidroto 11y agoi wonder how many books we all downloaded i got APL Programs for the Mathematics Classroom Norman Thomson Arithmetic Geometry Edited by Gary Cornell BASIC Game Plans Computer Games and Puzzles Programmed in BASIC An APL Compiler Timothy Budd The Chemical Bond Tadamasa Shida Holub on Patterns: Learning Design Patterns by Looking at Code Proofs from the Book
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]