Revision as of 22:57, 27 April 2014

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Submit free books and their author/license/title metadata using the summary macro below, or on the talk page!

For lists of available books, see Book lists.

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

[[]] : 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)
Translate: ·

Computer Algebra

[[]] : 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)
Translate: ·

Mathematics

Test-Prep Mathematics reviews GED level mathematics.

Quick Note Statistics outlines basic statistics.

	[[]] : 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) `Translate:` ·
	[[]] : Linear algebra via exterior products, by Sergei Winitzki ^edit Maintainers: · License: GNU FDL · Mime types: .pdf	`Download` v. · [homepages.physik.uni-muenchen.de/~winitzki/Linear_algebra_exterior.pdf source] `Tested in:` (trac) `Translate:` ·

Calculus

	[[]] : 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) `Translate:` ·
	[[]] : "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) `Translate:` · http://math.furman.edu/~dcs/mvbook/ http://math.furman.edu/~dcs/yact/ http://www.pdmi.ras.ru/~olegviro/ShchepinCalc.html http://www.whitman.edu/mathematics/multivariable
	[[]] : "Calculus" by Benjamin Crowell ^edit Maintainers: Ben Crowell · License: CC-BY-SA · Mime types: .html, .pdf	`Download` v. · [www.lightandmatter.com/calc/ source] `Tested in:` (trac) `Translate:` ·
	[[]] : 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) `Translate:` ·

Music

[[]] : "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)
Translate: ·

Science

UNESCO Sourcebook for Science Teaching
in Spanish:
Manual de la UNESCO para la enseñanza de las Ciencias
In French:
Manuel de l'UNESCO pour l'Enseignement des Sciences

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

The Motion Mountain Physics Texbook, 1612 free pages at http://www.motionmountain.net/download.html, with many figures, tables and embedded animations, also downloadable in 6 separate parts, CC-NC-ND licence.
The Physics textbooks by Benjamin Crowell:
- Electricity and Magnetism
- The Modern Revolution in Physics
- Conceptual Physics
- Optics
- Conservation Laws
- Newtonian Physics

	[[]] : "Motion Mountain - The Adventure of Physics" by Christoph Schiller; introductory physics text ^edit with over 2000 pages, 700 figures and films, 1700 puzzles and challenges Maintainers: Christoph Schiller · License: CC-BY-NC-ND · Mime types: .pdf	`Download` v.23rd edition, October 2009 · [www.motionmountain.net/download.html source] `Tested in:` (trac) `Translate:` ·
	[[]] : "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] `Tested in:` (trac) `Translate:` ·
	[[]] : "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] `Tested in:` (trac) `Translate:` ·
	[[]] : "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] `Tested in:` (trac) `Translate:` ·
	[[]] : A Radically Modern Approach to Introductory Physics by David J. Raymond ^edit Maintainers: · License: CC-BY-SA · Mime types: .html, .pdf	`Download` v. · source `Tested in:` (trac) `Translate:` ·
	[[]] : Radio Antenna Engineering by McGraw-Hill ^edit Maintainers: · License: BY-NC-SA · Mime types: .pdf	`Download` v. · [[2] source] `Tested in:` (trac) `Translate:` ·

Psychology

...

Economics & Social Science

http://www.introecon.com/
Economics I and II outlines college level Economics. Links provided to make material current.
...

from Kerala

jgay has some

http://www.toe.org/

Literature and more

Manybooks, a tremendous improvement on raw Gutenberg texts
fictionbook-lib.org, library of free eBooks in fictionbook format

self-published

TBPMD - not for children.

Baen Books Free Library

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

Free Online Books Internet Library

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:

The Libravox directory (including Librivox)

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.

The Andy Holt Virtual Library "Docustack" is hosted by the university of Tennessee at Martin, and focuses on children's literature.

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.

Epub

EPub is a free standard for reflowable content, which lets a reading device determine how it gets displayed. It uses XHTML or DTBook to represent text and zip as a packaging format. It replaced the older Open eBook standard in 2007. Related subformats and standards include the Open Publication Structure (OPS), Open Packaging Format (OPF), and OEBPS Container Format (OCF).

This is the latest format supported by the Read activity, and a standard supported by fbreader and many modern ebook publishers.

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.

OLPC's own .xol bundle format for Collections is a download format that the Journal unpacks and adds to the Library in Browse.
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.
the WikiBrowse activity is a web server that serves content from a compressed MediaWiki dump, forming a self-contained browsable offline wikireader

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.

Browse and the Read Etexts activity can render text files. Read also can but it opens them for editing.

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 self-contained bespoke 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

OLPC Features

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

@@ Line 358: / Line 358: @@
 == More Collections ==
-* Flat World Knowledge is a publisher of college-level textbooks and educational supplements. Educator teaching supplements and materials consistent with industry norms are available at no charge. More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_World_Knowledge
 Also working on the [[LiveContent]] DVD process:
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 * http://www.fhsst.org/
 * http://homepages.nyu.edu/~jmg336/html/mathematics.html
-* http://www.archive.org
 General digital books:
@@ Line 390: / Line 387: @@
 Audiobooks:
 * The [http://libravox.org/ Libravox directory] (including [[Librivox|Libr'''''i'''''vox]])
 === South Africa ===

Books: Difference between revisions