Anybody know a good source of free/cheap science ebooks?

[lvx35]

particularly like textbooks? Every textbook seems soooo expensive. Any ideas? Thanks!

[rzemanfl]

1. Kansas. They don't believe in it there. Arkansas and Alabama

too.

[lvx35]

4. heheh! lol nt

[mike_c]

2. are you looking for current edition texts or simply useful science texts?

Used bookstores in college towns are some of the best places for both, but used booksellers everywhere usually have shelves of older texts that are often fine for general learning purposes, just not as current. In some fields that's just not an issue, for example math texts from 50 years ago are mostly just as relevant as brand new ones, especially in classic topics like algebra, calculus, etc. Books a couple or three editions back are often pretty good in other fields-- on the other hand, occasionally something fairly seminal changes and older editions get it wrong. For example, our understanding of animal phylogeny has changed a lot in the last decade or so, and that is just beginning to appear in the latest editions of new zoology texts.

For used books from current editions, you might look at half.com. Some of my students have gotten good deals there.

[lvx35]

5. Old is fine...I'm looking for calculus, classical mechanics, biology.

That sounds like good advice. I'm a computer science student looking mostly for refreshers of some basic stuff in various feilds. say, you aren't a physics/chemistry teacher are you?

[mike_c]

8. no-- an entomologist and ecologist....

Sorry.

[lindisfarne]

3. Try a used bookstore and buy older editions of a recommended

textbook. As soon as a new edition comes out, the penultimate edition is worth $5. (half.com is another good source).

[mccoyn]

6. Wikipedia has some wiki books.

Most aren't fully developed, but I've found them useful anyways.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

[lvx35]

7. Wow, what an awesme project!

That's a noble quest....but I wish they had them in a downloadable form. I don't always have Internet where I want to study.

[mccoyn]

9. Some of the books have pdf format.

There is an icon in the upper right corner on some books that let you download a pdf version.

Otherwise, you can use a program called wget to download the index page and every page linked from it. This program will rewrite the html so that they will work locally, while you are not online. Its a command line program. If your not comfortable with command line there are some GUI versions on SourceForge. I've never tried any of these, so I don't know how useful they are.

[lvx35]

10. Thanks. I'll look for that....and I didn't know about wget.

Its installed right here on my linux machine too....Someday I will learn about all the linux goodies I didn't know.