Yes, I know that The National Academies (of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine) Press (
NAP.edu) offers a lot of
free ebooks. There's no news there--I first made a post about it probably 4 years ago now, and several other MobileReaders have, too, since then.
However, I got an email from NAP.edu today stating that "We're very excited to announce that we're now offering eBook downloads for thousands of titles on NAP.edu!" From some reason, they don't mention if they have opened up their catalog to offer far more
free ebooks than they had been, or meant something else by that statement. I don't know a very good (and, certainly, quick) way of finding out one way or the other.
Why didn't they address that question? I don't know. I can think of one innocent reason (they forgot to tell us) and one nefarious reason (they wanted us to take up our time searching their website to find out for ourselves). Having a B.S. in Marketing, having spent most of my career in some way connected with the field, blah, blah, blah, I know a little bit about the tricks that advertisers can play, and being cynical (and getting that way more and more every day) I cast my vote for the second reason.
But no matter. There is some truly valuable news that is mentioned--but not trumpeted--in this email message.
Free NAP.edu books are now available in mobi and ePub, as well as the PDF format that they have always been offered in!
I know that many of you don't like PDF for various reasons--perhaps the biggest reasons being the fact you do not think that PDFs render well on your portable ebook reader--and that has been one huge drawback to you downloading (more) ebooks from NAP.edu than you have. It hasn't made any difference to me, because 1) I don't currently use a mobile reader--I use my laptop computer to read ebooks, and 2) I'm not smart enough to understand much of what is written in these books (most of the books seem to be written for experts in the respective fields), anyway. So, I don't download many. But for some of you, arrival of mobi and/or ePub may come as welcome news.
NAP.edu gives us
this link as a place to start our exploration of the new change(s).