3,000 free online (science-y) books

June 12, 2006 10:57 AM

From the U.S. National Academies Press: 3,000 Science, Technology, Medical, and Social Science Books Available Free, Online. The interface is clunky - you can only see one page at a time, can't download PDFs (except paid) and image view is via TIFF - but! the content is all there, and free. Some is quite technical, but much is readily accessible. Some idea of the breadth: A Doctor's Memoirs of Treating AIDS in Haiti, The "Drama of the Commons", The 1872 Research Voyage of HMS Challenger, Biography of Stephen Hawking, Biotechnology Research in the Age of Terrorism, Risk Reduction Strategies for Human Exploration of Space, Forensic Lead Bullet Analysis, 50 Short Essays on How Mathematicians Think, Recent Research on Non-Lethal Weapons, and Introduction to Tough Topics in Contemporary Science. Also, see their rather spiffy site on the cosmos.
posted by Rumple (13 comments total)

NCBI's Bookshelf is also a pretty cool use of taxpayer money.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:59 AM on June 12, 2006

Very cool. I appreciate well written lay science for English majors like me. The Quantum Zoo looks great, if only for quoting Woody Allen: Photons have mass? I didn't even know they were Catholic!
posted by bardic at 11:05 AM on June 12, 2006

195 Free Online Programming Books
posted by blue_beetle at 11:30 AM on June 12, 2006

This kind of thing lives and dies on the interface. A good interface and it will be useful to everyone. Bad one, and it will be useful just to the people who would read the books anyway.
posted by smackfu at 11:38 AM on June 12, 2006

Nice!
posted by OmieWise at 11:41 AM on June 12, 2006

Although, yeah, I wish I could download them.
posted by OmieWise at 11:41 AM on June 12, 2006

Good find. And I thought the interface was fine. I read several of those easy math essays - the page could have loaded quicker, but it was a simple click-on-the-page-to-advance-to-next system that worked quite intuitively.
posted by soyjoy at 11:50 AM on June 12, 2006

This is great. I'm getting the impression that they're free as in beer, which is unfortunate; if they were actually released to the public domain it would be a relatively trivial matter to stick them on Project Gutenberg.
posted by mullingitover at 11:53 AM on June 12, 2006

Bookmarked for further exploration. Thx.
posted by econous at 12:16 PM on June 12, 2006

I had no problem downloading one, I just had to give them my email address.
posted by delmoi at 12:18 PM on June 12, 2006

truly excellent link.. thanks rumple!
posted by sergeant sandwich at 12:23 PM on June 12, 2006

I have often used NAP in researching various sciencey topics (interesting to see people reacting to it here). Low PDF resolution is the only real problem I've ever encountered.

You may also be interested in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), particularly the "This Week In PNAS" highlights.
posted by zennie at 2:26 PM on June 12, 2006

Hmmmmmm. Yes.
posted by Effigy2000 at 11:48 PM on June 13, 2006