More Online Books, Textbooks and Publishing

The best overall reference for online textbooks is Textbook Revolution. Many other textbooks can be found scattered about the web, usually at the author's website, and usually published for the Adobe Reader.

Al Fin has nothing against the Adobe Reader format, which has provided a wonderful publishing service -- good for both online reading and for downloading published material. But a competitor for the Adobe format, Scribd, is finding a large number of converts, and for good reason.

Here is the list of online textbooks at the Scribd website. Here is the full list of online book topics at Scribd.

eBooks will finally blossom into their own when electronic ink and electronic paper are optimised in an inexpensive and readily available form. The ideal eBook reader would read all of the important formats, and give free access to websites and all online materials. Update: This review of the Sony eBook reader by Scottish SF writer Gary Gibson gives a favourable first hand account of 6 months of use for the Sony device. H/T Futurismic

Of course, at the present rate of convergence, the typical palm-held device of the near future will have an eBook reader built-in, to go with everything else we are coming to expect from our iPhones and their clones.

Update Bonus Question: How will exam proctors keep test takers from cheating, when most of them are wearing implantable electronic skin tattoos that function like eBook readers, iPhones, web browsers etc. and can communicate with any number of other similar eTattoos scattered about the exam room?

Reading to Maximise IQ and EF: Million Book Project

The Million Book Project, an international venture led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, has completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books, which are now available online.

Physorg
A recent US National Endowment for the Arts report claims that American teens are not reading--which might explain why US children score 15 internationally in reading.

Some of the findings include that, on average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend two hours a day watching television and seven minutes reading. Also, less than one-third of 13-year-olds read something every day, which is a 14 percent drop from 20 years ago. And, looking at 17-year-olds, the percentage of non-readers jumped from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.

...Compared to the rest of the world, American 15-year-olds rank 15th in average reading scores, behind such countries as Poland, Korea, France and Canada. The entire report can be found online.

Source

If you stop hitting yourself on the head, the pain from the hitting will eventually go away. Likewise if children learn to read habitually, the knowledge deficit from not reading will be removed.

Librarians of the US have stated that they stand ready to assist the children of America. But for those who are too lazy to go to the library, the "Million Book Project" has now made over 1.5 million books available online--to children of the world, wherever they live.

“Anyone who can get on the Internet now has access to a collection of books the size of a large university library,” said Raj Reddy, professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon. “This project brings us closer to the ideal of the Universal Library: making all published works available to anyone, anytime, in any language. The economic barriers to the distribution of knowledge are falling,” said Reddy, who has spearheaded the Million Book Project.

...The collection includes a large number of rare and orphan books. More than 20 languages are represented among the 1.5 million books, a little more than 1 percent of all of the world’s books.

Many of the books, particularly those in Chinese and English, have been digitized — their text converted by optical character recognition methods into computer readable text. That allows these books to be searched and, eventually, reformatted for access by PDAs and other devices.

Physorg

As digital book readers get better, accessing and reading these free online books wirelessly will be effortless. The combination of "One Laptop per Child" with such mega-book digital archives may likewise prove a boon for childhood reading.

Try one of these: Here is a search engine to find free ebooks online. Try the Universal Digital Library link for instant access to 1.5 million books. Consult the alfin2100 sidebar under e-books. Checkout this list of free online books. Go to your local community or academic library and consult a librarian.

There is really no excuse for not reading. I recently listened to an NPR "Talk of the Nation" discussing the NEA report. One retired woman claimed she did not have time to read, because of "global warming!" Nope. No excuse.

If executive function and IQ are not being developed to the fullest, we can correctly blame government schools and the PC multicult approach to education--which automatically trims 1 SD from a person's IQ. But with all the free online courses, books, and information available online, the only person to blame is the parent who sends the child to government school--AND DOES NOT take the responsibility to supplement the child's education with readily available materials.

Hattip: Kurzweilai.net

Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation 2.0" Free Download!

Eric Drexler's classic book on Nanotechnology is now out in version 2.0. It is available as a free download from Wowio. The new version includes updated information from Drexler as well as material from the famous Drexler--Smalley debates.

"Some seminal works stand out like beacons in the history of science. Newton's "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" and Watson and Crick's "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" come quickly to mind. In recent decades we can add Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation," which established the revolutionary new field of nanotechnology. In the twenty years since this seminal work was published, its premises and analyses have been confirmed and we are starting to apply precise molecular assembly to a wide variety of early applications from blood cell sized devices that can target cancer cells to a new generation of efficient solar panels. We can now see clearly the roadmap over the next couple of decades to the full realization of Drexler's concept of the inexpensive assembly of macro objects constructed at the nanoscale controlled by massively parallel information processes, the fulfillment of which will enable us to solve problems -- energy, environmental degradation, poverty, and disease to name a few -- that have plagued humankind for eons."

-- Ray Kurzweil, inventor, and author of The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology

from the Wowio description of EOC 2.0.

Check out other free downloads from Wowio "Free Books, Free Minds."


Hat tip Advanced Nano.

Featured Online Portals to Learning

Continuing with the online learning theme from a few days ago, today's posting features two of the best collections of links to learning materials on the web.

First is Merlot.org. Merlot links to Arts(507 sites), Business(2417), Education(2012), Humanities(2282), Mathematics and Statistics(1151), Science and Technology(5807), and Social Sciences(987) websites. Some of the sites linked to might qualify as portals in themselves, others are java animations suitable for teaching small children. The site has to be explored in order to understand the wide variety of approaches to learning, from pre-school to post-graduate level. Highly recommended.

Then there is 101 Science, a well stuffed and eclectic website with a large set of links to many large sets of links to . . . . and so on. The theme is science and technology. Check out these meta-portals to biology and mathematics. There are many more. While you stand a good chance of finding what you are looking for at 101 Science, you will almost certainly find much more.

Both of these featured sites are well worth visiting. I also recommend the many reference links in the sidebar of the Al Fin main page. One of the main purposes of this website is to encourage readers to prepare themselves for more demanding times. Being well trained in only one field is not sufficient. The underpinnings of once stable societies are beginning to loosen and the fabric starting to unravel. Once trustworthy institutions have become worthless. Many things have to happen for the future to arrive, some of them a bit frightening. It would be better for readers and their loved ones not to be caught unaware.

Budgeting more time to learning, and learning how to learn, has gone from a luxury to a necessity.

Free Online Courses and Texts: Educating Yourself

Is there some subject you have always wanted to learn, but never had the time to devote to it? Are there topics you would like to know better, but cannot take the time off work, travel long distances for seminars, or devote big chunks of your budget for libraries of texts and references and class fees?

There are a lot of online class, text, and reference resources available free on the internet. Here are a few places to start looking:

Textbook Revolution--This site links to many different texts and educational resources for a wide variety of academic subjects, from math to sciences to engineering to health professions, economics, computers, and general education. Some of the resources are surprisingly good, some are only average. They update their holdings fairly regularly. Here is the official blog that updates and augments Textbook Revolution.

Open Educational Resources Wiki Repositories--This Wiki site links to several "mega-sites" full of tutorials, class materials, audio and video lectures, and many other types of educational resources. If you want to investigate these links thoroughly, set aside the better part of a day or more. This site links to some huge collections of fine links. Highly recommended.

Directory of Open Access Journals--This Directory links to 2265 free, full text journals on many topics, including Agriculture and Food Sciences, Arts and Architecture, Biology and Life Sciences, Business and Economics, Chemistry, Earth and Environmental Sciences, General Works, Health Sciences, History and Archaeology, Languages and Literatures, Law and Political Science, Mathematics and Statistics, Philosophy and Religion, Physics and Astronomy, Science General, Social Sciences, and Technology and Engineering. If you are not affiliated with a large institution, it can sometimes be hard getting access to reasonably up to date findings in a field of interst. Open Access Journals can be very helpful.

Like I say, these are only good starting points. You will quickly discover just how vast are the educational resources available free online, once you start looking.

The current system of education is obsolete, whether it knows it or not. The multi-media environment of the modern broadband internet just keeps getting better. As we get closer to "virtual reality" online environments, with haptic sensory interfaces, there will be very little in the way of course material that cannot be served over the net.
It may be that teledildonics will be the driving force financing broadband virtual reality on the net, but there is really no limit on the types of software and interfaces that can be connected. Then when nanotechnology finally provides a true "holodeck" environment, the fun and the learning will just be starting.