internet textbooks

March 7, 2005 6:55 AM

i read somewhere that people were taking textbooks and scanning them in and could be read on the internet. i was looking for some medical textbooks where i could just download them. is anyone doing this?
posted by dstrouse91 to Education (6 answers total)

were you thinking of this? Google is scanning books from libraries and posting them online. I know that "Oxford wants Google to scan all its books originally published before 1901."

I don't think it's readily available for a while, i'm not sure if you were thinking of something else but this was the most talked about that I heard.
posted by freudianslipper at 7:09 AM on March 7, 2005

Considering the price to be paid for textbooks these days, I doubt any legitimate site is doing this with current textbooks, and any other site will quickly shut down upon receipt of the cease and desist letter. The Merck Manual is available online.
posted by caddis at 7:23 AM on March 7, 2005

If you can read just a bit of Russian, this query will get you places.
posted by Wolfdog at 7:40 AM on March 7, 2005

NCBI has put up some current basic biomedical textbooks. They provide tables of contents but you have to search for the chapter headings in order to read the actual text. Just an obstacle to reading it cover-to-cover easily.
posted by grouse at 8:43 AM on March 7, 2005

A lot of science students are doing this and sharing scanned textbooks via CD - not surprising since biochem textbooks, for example, can run several hundred dollars. Maybe some are on web pages but I doubt it .... however it might be worth snooping around on usenet or P2P or torrent?
posted by Rumple at 12:18 PM on March 7, 2005

I read somewhere that book publishers actively look for these sites, to shut them down. For example, them might pay people to ask, in forums and other places, about them, while pretending to be students who are looking for such (copyright-violation) sites for their own use.
posted by WestCoaster at 2:03 PM on March 7, 2005