Book People Archive

Re: Freeload Press, textbookrevolution.org

Ben Crowell wrote:
> I realize that this list is mostly about digitizing old,
> public domain books, but I thought this might be of interest
> to some people.

Thanks for passing on the word!  A lot of us are interested in new
information as well as old ones, and are working on various projects
to get current information out to people more effectively.  (I see
that listmember Larry Sanger has just launched a new project that I'd
be interested in hearing more about, for instance.)

One thing I notice with many of these projects is that their coverage
tends to be weighted, sometimes quite heavily, towards the particular
interests of their most enthusaistic participants.  Visiting Wikipedia
this past week, for instance, I've seen articles of the day for Jabba the
Hutt, Windows 2000, caffeine, and Rush, which give a fairly good hint that
that resources' content is noticeably weighted towards nerd-interests.
(I say that affectionately, being somewhat of a nerd myself.)

When I look at The Assayer's subject listing, no other category
comes close to "Q: Science, Math, Computing" with over 800 titles.
The largest non-tech category is "P: Literature" with 124, and many of
the listings there appear to be fiction rather than information texts.

In your opinion, does this reflect that the overall selection of informative
free texts online is weighted heavily towards sci-tech, or does it reflect
a selection preference on your part?

If the latter, do you know of other resources that have more coverage of
areas like the humanities, social sciences, and other fields?  If the former,
do you see this as a problem, or do you have ideas as to how more
teaching-quality free books on non-sci-tech subjects can go online?

For The Online Books Page, I'm interested in adding more current textbooks
on various subjects when they've demonstrably made the grade.  (As far as my
criteria are concerned, "making the grade" includes all sections filled in
and reading like smooth prose rather than rough draft, and making it
either into major libraries, or into the course syllabi of appropriate
classes that *aren't* overseen by the textbook authors.)  I've recently
added two interesting texts on physical geography, for instance, that
both qualified, and I'm very interested in hearing about more such texts.

John Mark Ockerbloom