Quote:
Originally Posted by GtrsRGr8
I run across free "read online" only books quite often, but never have posted any. I don't remember ever seeing them posted on this thread or even in this forum. Maybe the reason is that they don't render well on tablets (I don't own one so I don't know). I know that the OP of this thread doesn't say anything against posting them. I want to use this post to conduct a test. I'm going to post some "read online" only books and basically kick back and see what kind of reaction that I get. If it's positive, I'll post a lot more in the future.
At http://openaccessbooks.nyupress.org/, NYU (New York University) Press lists somewhere around 70 Open Access ebooks that people can read online, free. I'm sure that they are all ebooks that NYU Press publishes. It looks like none of them are available for free download.
I encourage you to take a look at these books, and let me know either by PM or on the open thread what you think. I'm not so much interested in what you think about the quality of the books, although I hope that it is good, but just the whole concept of being informed when I run across this kind of ebook.
Thanks. |
The books are stored as unzipped epub directories for their online reading software, so they can be downloaded and reassembled into the original epubs.
The books have all been placed under a
Creative Commons license, so they can be redistributed by anyone to anyone as long as the source is acknowledged and it's non-commercial. I don't know what's behind NYU's decision to not provide download links, but I didn't see anything on the site restricting downloading the individual files. I've put together a list of Windows batch files that will download and assemble the epubs.
As long as
wget and
zip have been installed and "C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin" is in your executable path, you can double-click any of the batch files. An epub will be created in the same folder as the batch file. The batch files will also work as UNIX shell scripts if you specifically invoke the shell (i.e. "/bin/bash dl_9780814706404.bat").
If you decide to download all 62 books, keep in mind that you'll be downloading about 500 MB of data.