Is your interest is the piracy angle? If so, there are lots of free and
open ebooks for just about any topic you might care about! But on the
other hand, they may not be the best suited to the class being taught.
Amazingly enough, many profs are migrating to open/free sets of notes that
are equivalent to a book. The best example I know of is the
brilliant Mathematics For Computer Science
http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/fall10/mcs-ftl.pdf
And here is a huge selection of free or very inexpensive math books:
http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/mathematics.php
In terms of torrents, I found a russian site that had 80,381 text books
that had been collected from world wide torrents and they had packaged
them for direct downloads. That's a lota books! Most were an edition or
two behind the latest, but still quite usable.
Apple is starting to work very hard on textbooks for ipads, even with means
for "renting" them. They haven't gotten off the ground yet, but they hope
to be working with universities world wide within the year.
I find that the "illegal" downloads I have done either leads me to buying a
version of the book (often a used edition, and an edition behind) or
deleting it.
I do believe we need to make education freely available. Clearly Coursera
and Udacity are headed in that direction, with MITX following on their
heels. Accreditation is a problem, but being worked on for these digital
classrooms.
-- Owen
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 10:21 AM, Joseph Spinden <[email protected]> wrote:
> I came across an article I found interesting. I was curious about the
> reaction of the members of this group, if there is an interest.
>
> Joe
>
> http://www.aljazeera.com/**indepth/opinion/2012/02/**
> 2012227143813304790.html<http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/2012227143813304790.html>
>
> --
>
> "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."
>
> -- Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1913.
>
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