Books

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Books are a concept, a collection format, a way of organizing ideas; including ebooks, textbooks, picturebooks and others. There are many sources of Free books in the public domain, or under GFDL, various Creative Commons, and other licenses.

Other languages: see Spanish (and Libros), Portuguese

Books

Textbooks

Computer Science

icon for read [[]] : Dive into Python, an introduction to Python programming edit
 
Maintainers: Seth Woodworth  ·  License: GFDL  ·  Mime types: .html 		Download v.1 · [[[Image:Diveintopython.xol]] source]
Tested in: (trac)
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Computer Algebra

icon for read [[]] : Axiom Tutorial by Timothy Daly edit
 
Maintainers: Timothy Daly  ·  License: Modified BSD  ·  Mime types: .pdf 		Download v.IBSN 1-4116-65097-X · [[1] source]
Tested in: (trac)
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Mathematics

See also: http://www.digitalculture.org/index.html and http://openmathtext.org/downloads.html

icon for read [[]] : Linear Algebra by Jim Hefferon edit
 
Maintainers:  ·  License: CC-BY-SA  ·  Mime types: .pdf 		Download v. · [joshua.smcvt.edu/linalg.html/ source]
Tested in: (trac)
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Calculus

icon for read [[]] : Mathematics under the Microscope by Alexandre V. Borovik edit
The book explores the intersection of mathematics and cognitive science. 
Maintainers:  ·  License: CC-BY-NC-ND2.0  ·  Mime types: .pdf 		[[:Media:-[0.919 http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~avb/micromathematics/MMW.pdf].xo|Download v.[0.919 http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~avb/micromathematics/MMW.pdf]]] · [www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~avb/micromathematics/downloads source]
Tested in: (trac)
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icon for read [[]] : "Difference Equations to Differential Equations" An introduction to calculus, by Dan Sloughter edit
The book is split into sections, with each section being its own PDF. There are links to solutions. There are Java Applets for some sections. 
Maintainers: Dan Sloughter  ·  License: CC-BY-SA  ·  Mime types: .html, .pdf, .ps, .js, .class 		Download v. · [math.furman.edu/~dcs/book source]
Tested in: (trac)
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icon for read [[]] : "Calculus" by Benjamin Crowell edit
 
Maintainers: Ben Crowell  ·  License: CC-BY-SA  ·  Mime types: .html, .pdf 		Download v. · [www.lightandmatter.com/calc/ source]
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icon for read [[]] : Elementary Calculus: An Approach Using Infinitesimals by Jerome H. Keisler edit
 
Maintainers:  ·  License: CC-BY-NC-SA  ·  Mime types: .pdf 		Download v. · [www.math.wisc.edu/~keisler/calc.html source]
Tested in: (trac)
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Music

icon for read [[]] : "Eyes and Ears" by Benjamin Crowell; an anthology of music for sight-singing edit
 
Maintainers: Ben Crowell  ·  License: CC-BY-SA  ·  Mime types: .pdf 		Download v. · [http://www.lightandmatter.com/sight/sight.html source]
Tested in: (trac)
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Science

All have tested OK on Read on a G1G1 machine, except the Read interface takes a lot of usable space Yamaplos 12:56, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Physics

icon for read [[]] : "Light and Matter" by Benjamin Crowell; college-level introductory physics for life science majors edit
 
Maintainers: Ben Crowell  ·  License: CC-BY-SA  ·  Mime types: .html, .pdf 		Download v. · [www.lightandmatter.com/books.html source]
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icon for read [[]] : "Simple Nature" by Benjamin Crowell; introductory physics for engineering majors edit
 
Maintainers: Ben Crowell  ·  License: CC-BY-SA  ·  Mime types: .html, .pdf 		Download v. · [www.lightandmatter.com/area1sn.html source]
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icon for read [[]] : "Conceptual Physics" by Benjamin Crowell; introductory physics for gen ed students edit
 
Maintainers: Ben Crowell  ·  License: CC-BY-SA  ·  Mime types: .html, .pdf 		Download v. · [http://www.lightandmatter.com/cp/index.html source]
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icon for read [[]] : A Radically Modern Approach to Introductory Physics by David J. Raymond edit
 
Maintainers:  ·  License: CC-BY-SA  ·  Mime types: .html, .pdf 		Download v. · source
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icon for read [[]] : Radio Antenna Engineering by McGraw-Hill edit
 
Maintainers:  ·  License: BY-NC-SA  ·  Mime types: .pdf 		Download v. · [[2] source]
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Psychology

...

Economics & Social Science

from Kerala

jgay has some

Literature and more

  • Manybooks, a tremendous improvement on raw Gutenberg texts

self-published

  • TBPMD - not for children.

Baen Books Free Library

  • Baen Free Library - Science Fiction and Fantasy
  • Available formats HTML, Ebookwise, Mobipocket, RTF, Microsoft Reader

Searches and collections

Creative Commons & license-savvy searches:


More Collections

Also working on the LiveContent DVD process:

General texts

General digital books:

Libraries and search sites:

Audiobooks:


South Africa

see the 16 books recently released in 6 languages

childrens books online

  • World Public Library has made more than 1,000 eBooks freely available to the public specifically gathered for OLPC folks. Please visit to download the titles.

See also The OLPC literature page, with links to sites offering collections of free (Public Domain out-of-copyright) and commercial Ebooks in many languages. There are also specific book collections being developed by libraries and archives for OLPC (add your own!).

terminology

A "digital book" is a book that is stored in a computer and read on a computer screen. These are sometimes called "ebooks", but we refer to digital books simply as "books". Books are data without a reader application. (This last point is stretched somewhat by recent versions of Adobe Acrobat's PDF reader which can handle embedded Javascript applications in a PDF document and for HTML files containing Javascript). There is a place for rich documents containing their own reader code, but these blur the line between activities with lots of data and books as such.

Digital book formats

Book formats should be compressed (to conserve space) and open. In particular, they must not be encumbered by patents, and must be inclusive - they should not favor any particular vendor.

See wikipedia:Comparison of e-book formats for a more comprehensive list.

HTML

Although not particularly designed as a book format, HTML is widely used for books. Most newer Project Gutenberg books are available as HTML. Both special purpose Ebook readers and web browsers can be used to access HTML Ebooks.

HTML eBook packaging formats

HTML/XHTML has basically "won" as the presentation format for commercial and newly-published eBooks. Most eBook formats are just subsets or supersets of HTML or XHTML, using standard tags like <p>, <img>, <h1>, etc.

The debate has moved on to the organization and representation of such files for offline self-contained viewing.

  • The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) promotes a .epub XML file format, see ePub demystified.
  • In that, Bill Janssen comments "On the eBabel front, let’s examine the other web site packaging formats." Googling for “web page archive format”] gives one an interesting list
    • Microsoft’s MHTML, introduced in IE 5, documented in RFC 2557, and apparently also supported by the Opera browser.
    • Apple’s WebArchive, used by Safari.
    • The Library of Congress’ WARC, which they’re using to preserve Web site captures, and is a draft ISO standard.
    • WARC is based on ARC_IA, the format used by the Internet Archive.
    • There’s also MAF, the Mozilla Archive Format for Firefox 3, Christopher Ottley’s project.


XML

XML is not a directly usable format, but rather a meta-format. XML alone is not a book format, but many modern formats that can be used for books are XML based, such as ODF, and the XHTML variant of HTML. Other XML based formats are DocBook, popular for computer manuals, or TEI, used in the Humanities. Modern web browsers can render XML directly, but to make such a display attractive some transform (expressed in CSS or XSLT) may be required.

Text / ASCII / Unicode

The most basic format, can be compressed with simple/standard compression programs if needed. Original and default format for the Project Gutenberg e-texts.

DejaVU

The DJVU format was developed in order to provide a much higher level of compression for scanned paper books, than existing formats like JPEG and TIFF can provide.

PDF

The PDF format is a simplified form of the Postscript programming language that only includes the commands necessary to paint ink on the page. It is easy for end users to create PDFs with the Print function of a word processing or drawing application. There are extensive Free/Open Source libraries of functions for creating, editing, and otherwise modifying PDFS, and applications built from them. For example, libpoppler and the Poppler PDF Utilities. There are also several Free PDF display programs, including xpdf, kpdf, evince, gv, and ViewPDF. The Read activity uses Evince and poppler to render PDFs.

OpenDocument

OpenDocument is a compressed format (zip-compressed XML) for documents, including books, presentations, and spreadsheets. Complex documents (with many images) can be sent as a single document (unlike HTML), yet it can flow in a display (unlike PDF). It is also editable. The Write activity on the XO uses libAbiword and can open ODF files.

Greenstone

Greenstone is a monolithic format for document collections. A Greenstone library allows quick full-text search access to large collections, and is typically smaller than the full-text it contains, due to the compression scheme it uses. A Greenstone library can be both accessed via a web server or locally on a (read-only) disk. A complete Greenstone collection can be large, which makes it less useful, given the storage constraints of the OLPC.

FictionBook

"FictionBook is an XML format for storage of books where each element of the book is described by tags." Also known as fb2, it is supported by FBReader. In fact, the FBReader website lists other book formats that are not listed here.

DVI / TeX

DeVice Independent format. Output of a typesetting system called TeX that is very widely used in academic and open source technical literature. See wikipedia for more information.

Book Readers

On the XO

Browse

The Browse activity renders HTML, XHTML, and most image formats.

The users's home page in Browse is the "OLPC Library", which presents a navigation bar of available Collections on the XO.

Read/Evince

The Read activity uses the Evince library to render, and has a modified UI targeted to kids. Evince supports various image file formats including DJVU, PDF, [TIFF], and DVI with appropriate library support. Read in release 8.2.0 supports primarily PDF. See choosing image formats.

Write

The Write activity uses libAbiword which can render ODF .odt files.

Unclear if it can open them in read-only format suitable for eBook reading

Other book readers

Plucker

A popular book format for PalmOS devices. A reader for Linux/X11/GTK+ already exists in the plkr.org CVS codebase (and is distributed in the Plucker 1.8 source tarfile). It should run on OLPC machine's OS. Most Project Gutenberg books are already available in Plucker format at the URL 

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/plucker/NUMBER/NUMBER

where NUMBER is the PG book number for that book. For instance, John Stuart Mill's autobiography is available from PG in Plucker format as http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/plucker/10378/10378.

FBReader

An open source Ebook reader supporting many formats (fb2, html, chm, plucker, Palmdoc, mobipocket, etc.). more about FBReader

OpenBerg

OpenBerg Reader is a multiformat book reader based on Mozilla technologies. It's far from complete but it can already display rich XML/HTML books and organize libraries. Livesearch is in the works, as well as Plucker compatibility. The project could use help.

OpenDocument Viewer

The ODF Fellowship's OpenDocument Viewer could be used as a reader for OpenDocument files. It is open source.

OLPC Features

There are some pages already discussing how book formats and book readers could be specially adapted to the OLPC:

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