Books
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
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[[]] : 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
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[[]] : 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
See also: http://www.digitalculture.org/index.html and http://openmathtext.org/downloads.html
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[[]] : 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: ·
Calculus
Music
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
Psychology... Economics & Social Sciencefrom Keralajgay has some
Cross-curricular/intermediaBy linking a book with the Internet, teaching books are transformed into a huge dynamic ecosystem of knowledge and allows children to see our world in a global context. A concept that connects worlds; multimedia, intercultural and interdisciplinary as well as classical education and New Media. Read a book and be connected with the world:
Literature and more
self-published
Baen Books Free Library
Searches and collectionsCreative Commons & license-savvy searches:
More CollectionsAlso working on the LiveContent DVD process: General texts
General digital books:
Libraries and search sites: Audiobooks:
South Africasee the 16 books recently released in 6 languages childrens books online
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!). terminologyA "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 formatsBook 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. HTMLAlthough 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 formatsHTML/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.
XMLXML 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 / UnicodeThe 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. DejaVUThe 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. 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. OpenDocumentOpenDocument 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. GreenstoneGreenstone 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 / TeXDeVice 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 ReadersOn the XOBrowseThe 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/EvinceThe 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. WriteThe 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 readersPluckerA 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. FBReaderAn open source Ebook reader supporting many formats (fb2, html, chm, plucker, Palmdoc, mobipocket, etc.). more about FBReader OpenBergOpenBerg 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 ViewerThe ODF Fellowship's OpenDocument Viewer could be used as a reader for OpenDocument files. It is open source. yBookyBook A Free windows-only reader. With a book-like layout, it's a very comfortable reader to use. OLPC FeaturesThere are some pages already discussing how book formats and book readers could be specially adapted to the OLPC: |