Books: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 19:21, 15 February 2008

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.

Submit links to free books on the [talk page]!

Books

Textbooks

Mathematics

Calculus

|- valign="top" bgcolor="#F9F9Fc" class="olpc-activity-info" | width="5%" id="icon" name="icon" bgcolor="white" | | width="65%" name="description, authors, static metadata"| [[]] : 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 | width="30%" name="versions, builds, locales"| [[: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]
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|- valign="top" bgcolor="#F9F9Fc" class="olpc-activity-info" | width="5%" id="icon" name="icon" bgcolor="white" | | width="65%" name="description, authors, static metadata"| [[]] : "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 | width="30%" name="versions, builds, locales"| Download v. · [math.furman.edu/~dcs/book source]
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|- valign="top" bgcolor="#F9F9Fc" class="olpc-activity-info" | width="5%" id="icon" name="icon" bgcolor="white" | | width="65%" name="description, authors, static metadata"| [[]] : "Calculus" by Benjamin Crowell ^edit

Maintainers: Ben Crowell · License: CC-BY-SA · Mime types: .html, .pdf | width="30%" name="versions, builds, locales"| Download v. · [www.lightandmatter.com/calc/ source]
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Music

|- valign="top" bgcolor="#F9F9Fc" class="olpc-activity-info" | width="5%" id="icon" name="icon" bgcolor="white" | | width="65%" name="description, authors, static metadata"| [[]] : "Eyes and Ears" by Benjamin Crowell; an anthology of music for sight-singing ^edit

Maintainers: Ben Crowell · License: CC-BY-SA · Mime types: .pdf | width="30%" name="versions, builds, locales"| Download v. · [http://www.lightandmatter.com/sight/sight.html source]
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Physics

http://www.motionmountain.net/

|- valign="top" bgcolor="#F9F9Fc" class="olpc-activity-info" | width="5%" id="icon" name="icon" bgcolor="white" | | width="65%" name="description, authors, static metadata"| [[]] : "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 | width="30%" name="versions, builds, locales"| Download v. · [www.lightandmatter.com/books.html source]
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|- valign="top" bgcolor="#F9F9Fc" class="olpc-activity-info" | width="5%" id="icon" name="icon" bgcolor="white" | | width="65%" name="description, authors, static metadata"| [[]] : "Simple Nature" by Benjamin Crowell; introductory physics for engineering majors ^edit

Maintainers: Ben Crowell · License: CC-BY-SA · Mime types: .html, .pdf | width="30%" name="versions, builds, locales"| Download v. · [www.lightandmatter.com/area1sn.html source]
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|- valign="top" bgcolor="#F9F9Fc" class="olpc-activity-info" | width="5%" id="icon" name="icon" bgcolor="white" | | width="65%" name="description, authors, static metadata"| [[]] : "Conceptual Physics" by Benjamin Crowell; introductory physics for gen ed students ^edit

Maintainers: Ben Crowell · License: CC-BY-SA · Mime types: .html, .pdf | width="30%" name="versions, builds, locales"| Download v. · [http://www.lightandmatter.com/cp/index.html source]
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Psychology

Economics

http://www.introecon.com/

Kerala

jgay has some

http://www.toe.org/

Search

Creative Commons

Lists & Collections

South Africa

see the 16 books recently released in 6 languages

childrens books online

eBook formats : Bob DuCharme has put epub versions of some of the Project Gutenberg Childrens Books together.

Children's Fiction from Google Books

Children's Non Fiction from Google Books

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.

Bee Careful, Marvin Children's book about a bee named Marvin released under a CC license.

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 and formats

An "ebook" is a book that is stored in a computer and read on a computer screen. We refer to digital books simply as "books" on the wiki. 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). But for the purposes of this page we should restrict ourselves to the simpler, pure data digital books. There will be a place for rich documents containing Javascript, but these are really applications with lots of data, not books as such.

Ebook 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.

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.

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. The OLPC does include a web browser.

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.

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. AbiWord runs on the OLPC and is capable of opening 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 Ebook formats that are not listed here.

Book Readers

Evince

The Evince book reader is part of the OLPC project. Currently it supports DJVU, PDF, Postscript and DVI. The OLPC project will likely include only DJVU and PDF as well as an XML/HTML based format. The Read activity uses Evince to render, and has a modified UI targeted to kids.

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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 * http://www.ipl.org/
 * http://www.marxists.org/
+* http://theassayer.org/
 ==== South Africa ====