Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 
Free eBooks and Ways to Find Them
If anyone’s still out there, you’ve probably had enough Blueberry music. I’m going to be posting a longer article shortly, but I wanted to bring your attention to some handy resources for ebooks, as I’ve just found them. First, there’s MobileRead, which I haven’t just found, but which contains this directory of free ebook lists and author websites. It’s geared mainly to non-academic reading in multiple formats (PDF, Mobipocket, EPub).
They seem to have a small selection of individually-published open ebooks, though I’ve added links to Lawrence Lessig’s author page and Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma, so it’s possible that there are other open books to be had which have yet to be catalogued here. It’s a wiki—if you know of something tasty, you should add it to the directory.
In other news, I’m gearing up for thesis research and adding resources to my daunting pile of “oughtta-read-this-before-you-go-talking-to-other-people-dammit” books. It turns out that MIT Press includes a lot of CC books and article series, among them the following that are of interest to me and maybe you:
Iiyoshi, T & M. S. Vijay Kumar (Ed.). (2008). Opening up education: The collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open knowledge. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Link) I’ve been using articles from this collection since my first project in 2008; it’s full of tasty goodness.
Willinsky, J (2006). The access principle: The case for open access to research and scholarship. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Link) I haven’t read this yet but it looks pretty good, if you’re into the OA thang. Leslie Chan gets a mention.
Also, The MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning is available as well from the MIT Press. I’m particularly excited to look at Davidson and Goldberg’s The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, not surprisingly.
If anyone’s still out there, you’ve probably had enough Blueberry music. I’m going to be posting a longer article shortly, but I wanted to bring your attention to some handy resources for ebooks, as I’ve just found them. First, there’s MobileRead, which I haven’t just found, but which contains this directory of free ebook lists and author websites. It’s geared mainly to non-academic reading in multiple formats (PDF, Mobipocket, EPub).
They seem to have a small selection of individually-published open ebooks, though I’ve added links to Lawrence Lessig’s author page and Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma, so it’s possible that there are other open books to be had which have yet to be catalogued here. It’s a wiki—if you know of something tasty, you should add it to the directory.
In other news, I’m gearing up for thesis research and adding resources to my daunting pile of “oughtta-read-this-before-you-go-talking-to-other-people-dammit” books. It turns out that MIT Press includes a lot of CC books and article series, among them the following that are of interest to me and maybe you:
Iiyoshi, T & M. S. Vijay Kumar (Ed.). (2008). Opening up education: The collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open knowledge. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Link) I’ve been using articles from this collection since my first project in 2008; it’s full of tasty goodness.
Willinsky, J (2006). The access principle: The case for open access to research and scholarship. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Link) I haven’t read this yet but it looks pretty good, if you’re into the OA thang. Leslie Chan gets a mention.
Also, The MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning is available as well from the MIT Press, but start here for information and links. I’m particularly excited to look at Davidson and Goldberg’s The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, not surprisingly.
4 Responses so far
Kirsten
August 5th, 2009
12:36 pm
Ohhh, neat!!
Some great SF there
Thank you Thank you for the links!!
-Kirsten, (AKA Freekofnature on LiveJournal and gasp! Facebook) now a MRS. and enjoying it immensly! (The hard stuff comes later, hopefully much much later…)
Danny
August 5th, 2009
6:04 pm
If you like (or would like to try) Cory Doctrow, he makes his stuff freely available and you can download any format you’d like at feedbooks.com.
Do you have an ebook reader, Kirsten?
Kirsten
August 6th, 2009
12:59 pm
Re: ebook reader.
No not really. I do have Microsoft Reader on my PC’s and laptop and it does an excellent job of making it easy on the eyes to go through a book, either downloaded or on-line.
The whole fiasco with the Amazon Kindle and George Orwell’s 1984 really upset me and set me against it! If Amazon, whenever they choose, whenever they want, can reach into the ebook reader that they SELL you, and can yank out any book THAT YOU HAVE PURCHASED without your consent or even notification or ANY respect for your rights as the purchaser of the content, whether or not some legal technicality is ruled as infringement BY A THIRD PARTY, and leave you without your purchased content and NO recourse for this illegal and unauthorized SEARCH AND SEIZURE OF YOUR PROPERTY, then I want no part of it. I hope ebooks with this capability die on the vine, ignored and despised by educated media consumers everywhere!
Like, where does it stop? What if some court, some judge somewhere decides that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe is pornographic, according to community standards in their jurisdiction (not yours) and issues a court order to Kindle to YANK it out of each and every ebook, everywhere? And being that it is an ebook, does not need a court issued warrant to do so.
You see where this is going? I do not want an ebook reader under these conditions. I hope Kindle goes bankrupt and the investors and VC’s lose their shirts! Imagine giving the Kindle the capability for this to happen!
Sorry for my rather over vigorous reaction to your most innocent question, but the subject really bothers me. I feel this is a case of good technology being abused and customers being taken advantage of by a large, unfeeling, and corrupt corporation which only cares about maximizing profit and minimizing legal exposure, their customers rights be damned…
Danny
August 6th, 2009
1:57 pm
Fair enough. I’m not aware of anyone standing behind Amazon’s catastrophic handling of the Orwell uploads, and I actually rejected the Kindle when deciding on which reader to buy a couple of years ago, fearing very much the constant connection to the mothership, proprietary document formats, hoops, and stupidity. (Also, we can’t get it in Canada anyways.)
You might be missing out, though, if you write off dedicated readers entirely; the dissolving capsule is a pretty handy technology even if some of them have contained cyanide. For basic reading, I’ve been using a Cybook Gen3, which has no Internet functionality and connects via USB or memory card for document transfers. For research journal and textbook reading/note-taking, I’ve recently bought an iRex Digital Reader 1000s that I got two days’ use out of before a disaster that’s currently got it back in shop and I’ve been missing it violently. Both readers need their firmwares updated manually (and therefore allow you complete control over the version of the operating system and its features). If you haven’t seen eInk technology in person, you should before you write off dedicated readers entirely. Amazon is alone in its “invasive convenience” for the time being, and even Sony is pretty benign in comparison.
The only thing that really makes me crinkly about the readers is that they’ve allowed Digital Rights Management an environment in which to thrive and spread from music into books (though this isn’t especially new—years ago my father started amassing a collection of ebooks to read on his PDA that are now useless because they’re locked to that device with a password I can’t retrieve). But, again, resistance to DRM is heavily established all across the spectrum of legality, so for those who’d rather their ebook purchase gave them the sort of functionality and flexibility that a traditional book purchase would—sharing, freedom of environment in which to read, etc.—there’re tools and communities of like-minded folks to be easily found.
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