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> 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
by 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.