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Anyone who is a student should know that most of the big publishers e.g. Springer, Cambridge Uni. Press, etc have extensive online libraries that your universit
by joshvm 9y ago
Anyone who is a student should know that most of the big publishers e.g. Springer, Cambridge Uni. Press, etc have extensive online libraries that your university probably subscribes to. You can go there and download complete books, many of which would be extremely expensive to buy otherwise. A lot of it is academic and dry, but occasionally there are some gems. It was fun to sift through random topics that I had no idea about (like forensic pathology) and build up a small eBook library. Best of all it's within your right as a student to do it (your uni pays thousands for these subscriptions), so exploit it while you can.
Most of the time you have to download chapters separately, but I did write a little script that would authenticate with Shibboleth, pull the whole book and combine the PDFs. There was no DRM either, just a watermark with your IP or university details to discourage sharing.
- JadeNB 9y ago> You can go there and download complete books, many of which would be extremely expensive to buy otherwise. As much as I hate to say something nice about one of the big publishers, Springer even has a nice little filip: if you already have the eBook, you can buy a physical copy for very cheap ($25, I think). I've never tried this, so I don't know if having access through your university counts. > Most of the time you have to download chapters separately, but I did write a little script that would authenticate with Shibboleth, pull the whole book and combine the PDFs. There was no DRM either, just a watermark with your IP or university details to discourage sharing. Be careful with this, though; Cambridge, for example, bans you for a while if you download too many files. (Obviously "too many" isn't rigorously defined, but I hit it while downloading two many-chapter books.) I can imagine triggering a more aggressive ban if they think you look like a robot downloader.
- joshvm 9y agoI made a list of books I liked the look of, saved it to a text and then setup the script to run every hour ± a bit. Wasn't going to be any faster than I could read them! I don't recall ever being rate limited so I guess the strategy worked.
- trobertson 9y agoWould you be willing to share that script? I'm heading to grad school in a month, this would be very useful.
- joshvm 9y agoSure, I'll drop you an email.