|
Pirated and Open Source Books
The New York Times covers the latest trend in file-sharing in First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry. Students who are angry about the cost of textbooks are turning not only to used books, but places like PirateBay.org where they can download scanned textbooks for free.
I have actually been looking into this topic for my upcoming course on Libraries and the Open Movement and have come across quite a few projects with Open Source books which have been made free by their copyright holders. If you are a student or a professor about to choose your readings for the fall semester, you may want to consider some of these choices:
- Make Textbooks Affordable Campaign
- Textbook Revolution
- O’Reilly’s Open Books Project
- Open Source Books from the Internet Archive
- Wikibooks
- Global Text Project
- Flat World Knowledge
- Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources Open Textbooks Project
If you know of any other open source textbook projects, please link to them in the comments!
July 31st, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Thanks for this list. I had started a list like this myself some time ago. There are perhaps some additional resources listed there http://searchingforscience.pbwiki.com/Course-materials
August 1st, 2008 at 5:03 am
If you haven’t already, check out connexions at http://cnx.org/
August 1st, 2008 at 7:43 am
Connexions is great Jennifer, thanks for bringing that up, and Wouter thanks for sharing your wiki, there’s a lot of really useful resources listed there. I love the syllabus finder!