Sooo many good books! I'm exhausted! Here are some good ones:

MPEG Video Compression Standard:

http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b115884

Chaos and Fractals:

http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97624

Proofs from THE BOOK:

http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-05412-3

Joel on Software:

http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-0753-5

Programming Challenges:

http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97559

If you are interested in the first one, I'd recommend this too:

Data Compression

http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97635

None of the links work for me, even though I was able to download a few hours ago. I have the option to purchase...

Seems to have gone dead. Maybe it was a bug at Springer or a brief promotion.

I cannot download any of these for free. Could it have to do with me accessing the site from Germany?

Nah, it seems they shut it down already. Probably a bug :)

The Things You Should Never Do, Part One by Joel Spolsky should be mandatory reading for every tech executive.[1] Springer might add more value to the texts by enabling Medium style side comments on an HTML version for readers to either ask for help or for experts to clarify and extend. Use the job posting business model to post jobs in the comments in specific disciplines of the texts to create revenue.

[1] http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4302-0753-5_2...

Chapter 4, page 313 is quite an interesting read (2000 vs 2015 point of view)

The corrected link from page 316 (bottom) - hilarious: http://web.archive.org/web/20001203002400/http://microsoft.c...

Page 325 talks about the porting effort which didn't work out, and the Wasabi language was born: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FogBugz#History

Here's the original blog post, for anyone who was interested in reading it after Springer decided to reinstate its $30-per-chapter charge:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

(While I know they charge like this for most of their e-books, this particular example is embarrassing.)

MPEG Video Compression Standard:

http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b115884

It says restricted to me and offers me to buy chapter for

$29.95 and whole book for $229.00

Did you get the book "Proofs from The Book" while it was open to download?

None of these work for me.

I am not able to download Programming Challenges book.

Some good CS books that I found:

Approximation Algorithms http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-04565-7

How to Solve It: Modern Heuristics http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-07807-5

Modern Graph Theory http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-0619-4

Computational Geometry http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-03427-9

Also Skiena's "Algorithm Design Manual" will be available in 2018 :)

From Newton to Mandelbrot http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-86780-4 shows how to use small tractable computer simulations to understand Physics.

Modern Heuristics is in my top-k books of all time. Check out Zbigniew Michalewicz's other books @ http://cs.adelaide.edu.au/~zbyszek/books.html

> Check out Zbigniew Michalewicz's other books @ ...

thank you ! this led me to his books on evolution programs (Genetic Algorithms + Data Structures = Evolutionary Programs), which is an excellent book as well.

Access seems to have been cut off about 2 hours ago. Presumably this was a mistake, but new-year optimists might hope that Springer did this on purpose, to gauge the market at low cost. As someone with a full-time job, I'd be happy to pay $10 to $20 to download an old book that might come in handy, but with conventional download costs being half the paper cost, I balk and just walk over to the university library so I can copy the 5 pages I actually need in the book.

I reached out to the folks at Springer and asked them whether the availability of 57,000 titles for free download had been some kind of accident. Here's the response I got:

> Thank you for reaching out to us. From time to time our titles may become available to the public for legal download. There is no guarantee that titles available will remain available permanently. The only titles that will remain available are titles marked as Open Access.

Thus, it sounds like what happened was an accident or publicity stunt. I expect access to remain cut off.

Maybe if we wait another 10 years we'll get access to some more books. It's a shame that I didn't get a chance to download any of the books but then again I already have a backlog of other books to read so it's no great tragedy to me.

I don't understand this at all. Does their contract language with authors allows them to give books away at random times...?

I'd guess that they can do it under some sort of promotional clause in the contract, something stating that the publisher doesn't need to pay royalties for promotional copies of any book.

I am not an expert on copyright law -- do you (or anyone) know to what extent I am legally allowed to share the books I downloaded from Springer's website while I could?

In particular, I am teaching a course this spring based on two Springer books that I was able to download yesterday. If I e-mail PDFs to all of my students, am I legally in the clear?

I am not an expert either, but it is unlikely you ever had the right to share the files in any way, especially as it seems the error had still the standard license, but with cost of 0.00.

I am quite annoyed by this revert -- especially by the fact that big publishers can generate so much good will just by a simple error that gets shared on the Internet, while the correction will get minimal exposure.

Unfortunately, I do not think that you may legally share the works. Their terms of service currently say:

1.2 You may solely for private, educational, personal, scientific, or research purposes access, browse, view, display, search, download and print the Content.

1.3 You may not: [...] re-distribute, reproduce, or transmit the Content by any means including electronic (e. g., via e-mail) nor post it on their personal or public websites or on public networks...

So while you may have the copy of the book legally, it seems unlikely that you can give it to your students. There's always a chance that what they're saying isn't legally enforceable (see non compete agreements), but I don't think that's the case here. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say for sure.

Depends on what license was communicated with the books when you downloaded them (or that is in the books themselves).

If there's no license specified, default is "all rights reserved" and you cannot distribute the books to your students free of liability.

This might depend on the country you're in. E.g. Polish law allows sharing of copies of works such as books between people who know each other (the exact condition is more involved, but boils down to essentially this).

Many books are indeed available for free download (including non-CS books), but most of the ones linked in this thread aren't.

Examples of working links: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-5927-5 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-6131-5 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-0100-8

Those links are to "Open Access" books and have always, I believe, been free (as in beer).

The content identified by the original post were not open access; they were paid access (typically quite expensive) and published in 2004 or before.

I hope the zero cost downloads was not a glitch but a policy, and that Springer will make those older texts freely available again.

I hope nobody gets fired for this. Probably a lots of these leaked books will be up on torrent sites.

* Probably a lots of these leaked books will be up on torrent sites.*

If I had to guess, I'd say a pretty good chunk of them already were on torrent sites or LibGen.

That makes me wonder if after hitting a certain threshold in popularity they convert it from free to paid content.

I have access to SpringerLink as an Edinburgh University alumnus, through their contract with the university library. This means I can download a large number of their titles (not just the OpenAccess ones) apart from some restricted content (referred to as Preview Only Content when searching.) This includes many recent books and journals, all downloadable as PDF or EPUB format. For example the 'Praxis' series on spaceflight is excellent, including a book on SpaceX [1] among many others. The other cool thing this offers me is the ability to buy a thing called a MyCopy Softcover Edition version of these books for only GBP/EUR/USD 24.99 rather than the usual GBP 100 price for the hardback, which is pretty awesome if you like having actual, physical books to read...

So, I suggest you have a look into this and see if you can also get access via the academic login page and Shibboleth or Athens. Or, if not available to you personally, you may be able to just go to your nearest university library and get access to the books that way, too...

[1] http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4614-5514-1

Through my university network the books are still available (and have been for years). Might also be an interesting option for anyone living near a university with an open library.

OP link lists 66,327 results (i.e. books) available free of cost.

It appears to be working well for me, so perhaps a temporary glitch.

EDIT: no, I was mistaken. I can "download PDF" but it looks like that's typically only introductory content and not the entire book.

Larry Wasserman's All of Statistics is there at http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-21736-9.

Optimization by Lange is at http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4757-4182-7

Time Series Analysis and Its Applications by Shumway and Stoffer (http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4757-3261-0), who developed the EM tools for fitting state space models to time series by maximum likelihood, but were largely uncredited by the NIPS crowd.

Looks like another good collection for archive.org to back up... ;-)

The site works without Javascript and contains direct links to PDFs, which is an unexpected bonus in this age of single-page JS apps and DRM. Very nice.

I wonder if the 2005 ones will also become free in 2016?

It won't be archived because of the robots.txt

One of the things I've realized just a few days ago was that we need better technology to absorb content efficiently.

There are so many books out there that I want to read, but might never be able to read because I will not have enough time. It would be amazing if there was just a way to download a book and understand its contents right into my brain in a matter of minutes.

Last time I had to absorb content efficiently I went for Kindle and their text-to-speech set at faster pace. I followed the robot's voice by reading the book myself and writing down a summary sentence / keywords per every page read. This way it took me a day (from early morning to late night) to read a 400 pages long Lawrence Lessig's "Code 2" and write a review. Next day I managed to get highest score at the relevant exam. It kind of makes sense that reading + writing + listening allows one to deeply absorb content and probably is the best combination so far.

It would be really interesting to see an interactive textbook that is combined with audiobook and asks you to read along and summarise every chapter. Not only it would increase speed of reading, but also help with memorising content.

> It kind of makes sense that reading + writing + listening allows one to deeply absorb content and probably is the best combination so far.

This is probably one of the best ideas I read on HN this year. It just seems to match up very well with my own study experiences, and the advice I have read recently in 'A Mind for Numbers' http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G3L19ZU

Thanks, I shall try this!

The technology is evolving in that way, sort of. We have tools for content analysis and one of such analysis is text summarization. It would be extremely useful if text summarizators would become developed enough to be of any practical use. To be able to easily create a summary for the entire book, then if you're interested - for the individual chapters, and so on, each time in various volume/detail according to your time constraint and degree of interest. Pretty much like a zoom function you do on a very high resolution image.

That's what the idea behind IBM Watson is, because he can read much faster than any human and you can ask him anything without knowing anything about it yourself and he will give you an answer based on all books and scientific papers he was able to read until that point...only problems are a) you have to trust the evaluation and conclusions of a computer (better the programmer of the algorithms maybe) because b) probably nobody can verify the definite correctness or wrongness of an answer, because nobody has been able to study and to read as much about a topic as him. Exciting technology that is. And exciting times we are living in where computers start "knowing" more about any given topic than a human is able to about one single area and starts answering our questions about them...!

Matter of minutes might never be possible or even desirable. But I do think learning can be done much more efficiently with the right tools. Working on that on my side projects ;) It comes down to good old note taking and expressing what you have learned in your own words or code.

One technique I have been thinking of is to use AI/NLP to automatically generate questions from the text. It might not know the answer, but it doesn't have it.

What is the status of that speed reading app? It would display each word in the middle of the screen if I remember correctly, and by that way you could speed up reading a lot. I don't remember the name. Maybe not recommended for a good novel, and I don't know if it would really help in reading a book with difficult content, but still.

Reading speed is rarely the bottleneck in reading textbooks, just as typing speed is rarely the bottleneck in coding. In fact, I found that strictly limiting my reading speed, e.g. by forcing myself to spend at least two minutes on a page before turning over, has greatly helped me to understand texts better and more thoroughly.

Actually, novels are the only part where I could see some value from speed-reading, as the plot is usually not all that difficult to follow and at least in most cases the language not nice enough to marvel at it, though I suppose the latter is what you meant by “good novel”.

While this may have been true when it was posted it is no longer true. If you think about it the idea doesn't make sense because the still living authors still want a cut. It's unfortunate because it's very difficult to find good textbooks just by searching yourself because the prices are so high.

What are the odds this change was made in error? i.e. someone pruning a database, only to have the website logic interpret that as "free" ?

I don't buy the idea that the authors all still want a "cut" so to speak, given that many authors (at least in statistics) make copies freely available on their websites. I know Shumway did with the time series text and I beleive Lasserman did as well.

It may just be the site getting hammered. I'm seeing my searches limited to 2011-Present even though I'm searching 1990-Present.

Sounds more like they just hid them until they have a proper fix.

Interesting books with >4 star Amazon ratings:

The Meaning of Relativity (Einstein) http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-011-6022-3

Centauri Dreams: Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4757-3894-0

The Physics of Musical Instruments http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-21603-4

Introduction to Nanoscale Science and Technology http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b119185

Scanning Electron Microscopy and X-ray Microanalysis http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4615-0215-9

Structures or Why Things Don't Fall Down http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4615-9074-3

Fundamentals of Power Electronics http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b100747

Advanced Organic Chemistry A/B http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b114222 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b114293

Principles of Terrestrial Ecosystem Ecology http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97397

One of the best of these is Holub on Patterns [1], which is IMO the best book for learning patterns. How to implement patterns, how to know which ones to use where, and how to use them in combination. Excellent, clear tutorial. Implementation language is Java.

[1] http://goo.gl/DKFzCe

Slight tangent: if one is interested in design patterns, consider reading the book "A Pattern Language", 1977 by Christopher Alexander et al. It's the original patterns book, for architecture.

Continuing tangent: if that sounds interesting, please consider also reading the precursor book "The Timeless Way of Building" by Christopher Alexander. It focuses on the theory and the philosophy. This is a beautiful book, in both senses of the beauty of the book itself, and the beauty of the ideas contained inside. It is very humane.

"There is one timeless way of building. It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has always been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. And as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form as the trees and hills,and as our faces are."

It wouldn't hurt to have more humane and beautiful things in the world, particularly those that are designed and built and customised by those who must inhabit or use them. Whether those things are buildings, or software, or laws, or societal goals.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0195024028

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheTimelessWayOfBuilding

Aaron Swartz would be really happy if he heard this news.

Filter for all books published in English at least 10 years ago (downloadable), newest first:

http://link.springer.com/search?facet-content-type=%22Book%2...

"Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics", published at least 10 years ago. Higher signal to noise if you're just looking to pick up some field of mathematics.

http://link.springer.com/search?facet-series=%22666%22&facet...

Thank you and thank you Springer!

You just made my personal day and ruined my office day :-). I'll now spend rest of the day, and perhaps week, drooling over, downloading (and uploading them to my DropBox account) a whole bunch of these :-)

This is great - I've been looking for a good series to have on hand when I want to dive deeper into a math field on an as-needed basis. For example, the Linear Algebra one could be really useful if I decide to get deeper into any Machine Learning stuff - http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-1670-4

It's possible to do things with statistics/ML even without having the greatest grasp on linear algebra, but it sure would help to have a firmer foundation. Thanks!

Although I have not read that book, for linear algebea I would highly recommend Gilbert Strang's book. It's one of the few textbooks for which I would pay full price, even today. Also, his lectures are available on youtube from MIT, and he's quite good.

If you read German, his "Lineare Algebra" was published by Springer in 2003:

http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-55631-9

Seems the only version of this book on Springer is in German :(

The mere sight of a yellow and white book cover takes me back to my graduate school days anymore. :-)

Well there are prices appearing now for me in the UK so apparently those freebies weren't intentional.

sad

Same here. I tried one hour ago and could get one and now is all "Get Access"

Bad Springer :(

I'm in UK as well and everything was working just fine up until ~15 minutes ago.

This may be something decided depending on your geographic position where author's or editor's rights are differently being applied then.. From where I am I can get a "Download Book" button.

Not sure about that, just checked a link from a book that I had downloaded previously (this morning) and the download option was no longer there.

Same here (Germany), saw this in the morning, wanted to download after lunch, doesn't work anymore.

Is there some sort of announcement from Springer about this? Specifically, one in which they state what the license is, e.g., CC-BY or CC-BY-SA or something like that? I'll bet they attached either the No-Derivs (ND) or Non-Commercial (NC) limitations, though -- would love to be wrong about that. In the PDFs I've looked at so far, they didn't bother to change the copyright statement at the front of the book, so they still all appear to be under traditional restrictive copyright, whatever new terms Springer intends notwithstanding.

-Karl

From http://www.springeropen.com/books

> SpringerOpen books are published under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC) license, so they can be reused and redistributed for non-commercial purposes as long as the original author is attributed.

SpringerOpen is not what's being talking about here. There are only a few dozen books listed in that page. I don't think any of the books being referenced in the comments is there.

That page isn't a complete listing, but you're right, only ~100 of the books seem to be properly open access, unfortunately. I guess Springer can decide to revoke access to the rest at any point in the future.

Edit: looks like they've revoked access already in fact https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10811854

I should have downloaded a few more, in retrospect it's clear it was too good to be true... Especially when no announcement had been made.

yeah, it looks like they are still under traditional copyright. It's just that the purchase price is $0.00. Free as in beer.

Still, that's pretty cool!

The only issue with that is sites like archive.org might not be able to legally cache and serve these.

Edit: It’s still a Very Good Thing.

The site's terms and conditions [1] state:

"You may solely for private, educational, personal, scientific, or research purposes access, browse, view, display, search, download and print the Content."

[1]: http://link.springer.com/termsandconditions

The website says "Open Access: This content is freely available online to anyone, anywhere at any time."

Why is it technically illegal to download them?

It isn't, assuming Springer doesn't have contracts with author precluding it. Springer is either the copyright holder or is authorised to distribute, and they are explicitly making the works available for download. You don't need any additional permission.

Any license changes they publish are important to establish your right to make any subsequent copies, though.

there is somewhat of a difference between "purchasing something for 0.00 with appropriate distribution after creating an account at a webshop" and "torrenting a pdf"

The quote says it is legal to download them

--edit: apologies, should be a response to parent

Thank you Nate, that is the best link of HN for the year. I'm seriously impressed with Springer for doing this. Who is next, Elsevier?

It looks like it was a mistake?

Now I'm imagining a Yes Men style hack where we release a P.R. apparently from Elsevier where they make all of their backfiles open access because of the social good it would do.

To be fair, although they are both way, way behind, Elsevier and Springer both have a surprising amount of material available for free online. (I don't say this with any relevant examples to hand, but rather as a mathematician who is often surprised that I don't need to use my university proxy to access an article.)

I also think that Springer deserves serious credit for their commitment to reasonable e-book publication: once you have access, you download the PDF and you have it; no DRM, no special reader software. So many other e-publishing sites want to make sure that I can't actually read their files that this straightforward approach is a relief.

With that said, I am bummed that I missed this apparent window of opportunity!

I got a book about Ted Nelson out of it and I don't feel like a pirate :) Wished it had lasted a little longer though, I had an hour and a half conference call and I figured I was going to spend some time tonight looking over the computer section to get some 'light reading' for the new year. Springer has a hard time competing on price with the amount of free stuff that is floating around on the net, but the quality of their bookshelf is very high and this was the closest we ever got to having an actual library online, even if only for 2 hours. It'd be interesting to see which books were downloaded by the whole community.

Oh, crap. What you have done... How am I supposed to leave the house, now? :)

BTW: found this gem for brain-science junkies: http://rd.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-79928-0 - Neurobiology of Decision-Making, edited by Damásio, Damásio & Christen (the first "Damásio" is António Damásio, author of "Descartes' Error").

Searched for "Compiler" and was not disappointed.

Tim Budd's "An APL Compiler" is a classic.

I love the goofy title of Mads Tofte's: "Compiler Generators What They Can Do, What They Might Do, and What They Will Probably Never Do"

Paid a handsome amount for these and many others at Reiter's Books back in the day!

It's insane the ebook costs $89.

For theoretical purposes, unless you're working at the very edge of the state-of-the-art, a book 10 years old is as good as new

Besides Machine Learning and some niche topics most books on the list should be very useful and applicable

This is simply fantastic. I'm sure all publishers will follow. +1 to Springer.

Here is my current read:

Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-05642-4

Well it's understandable.

While most of us are in the middle of holidays theres some poor soul beavering away trying to implement some feature before the "end of the year" deadline and tapped the wrong combination of keys and bam! the bank account graph starts dipping and crap hits the fan.

Hey, why don't you read some of the theoretical security / programming books that your company publishes?

-11 to Springer.

This was discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10800881, but another thread seems like a good idea, so more people can know about this. The intellectual riches available here are incredible.

I missed the first round, super happy to see this.

Thank you! Since the browsing experience on Springer is not very friendly, here is a link to all the old Springer titles in Amazon's catalog:

Springer: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_b/?search-alias=s...

Apress: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_b/?search-alias=s...

"Formulas, Facts and Constants for Students and Professionals in Engineering, Chemistry, and Physics" by Helmut and Kurt Fischbeck. Just download it now and thank me later. http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-72555-5

Gold! God bless you, sir!

The fun is over. There are only 135 books available now instead of 56,000.

Yeah, most of the books I attempted to download were restricted.

I really wish the ACM would do this, even if it was +15 years.

Access is no longer open (at least not from my side)... I guess it was some bug at Springer? A pity.

My favorite find so far is "Advances in Crypto" conference proceedings going back to the early eighties:

- http://link.springer.com/search?query=%22advances+in+cryptol...

Crypto thread is here!

- The Design of Rijndael http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-04722-4

The book is still available for free from the authors:

http://jda.noekeon.org/#RijndaelBook

For those who are interested in these kind of programs, please see directory of open access books (DOAB) site - http://www.doabooks.org/doab?func=subject&uiLanguage=en

Beauty of Fractals: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-61717-1

Chaos and Fractals: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97624

I'm now seeing "Get Access" (i.e., pay money) instead of "Download Book". I wonder if Springer shut this down? Or if there is some quantity or rate limit on the downloads?

How long will they remain accessible for download? Hopefully indefinitely. I'm on vacation. Crossing my fingers I'll be able to download them when I get home.

This is so awesome. Makes and ruins my day. I'm wondering what that means for authors and writing technical books in general though. Have authors a say in this?

Technical subjects are probably the best possible to do this in for both publishers and authors - especially textbooks quickly depreciate in monetary value, but they'll gain a lot of extra exposure for authors and newer titles.

I'm sure they have some classics where they'll lose some sales, but most of these titles will have been superseded by newer books or subsequent editions of the same books long ago.

Some of these aren't very old at all! E.g.:

Intertwingled, about Ted Nelson, 2014:

http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-16925-5

I love how you can download individual chapters instead of the entire book

Best of all, you can use Lulu.com or a similar service to print them if you want nice hardcopies. :)

What a great announcement for the end of the year :)

+1 to msie's recommendation to read Chaos & Fractals (http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97624)

I downloaded the HTML of the page. Out in the middle of the text is a really simple version of the full list easy to work with in an editor. I got a list of the PDFs I'd like (basically nearly all the analysis and applied math and nearly none of the algebra or topology, and set up a script with the famous CURL to do the downloads to file names I'd picked out, etc.

But their Web server rejected, "closed", all the CURL connections. I tried some really simple software I had based just on sockets, and those connections were closed also. My Web browser connects and downloads the file one at a time just fine.

So, maybe I need a newer version of CURL that looks more like a Web browser?

Or just use Firefox, manually, one PDF at a time. Bummer.

Check out the -A option to spoof your user agent with curl. If you use a proper user agent string, that will probably work.

You could use Down Them All extension for Firefox too.

For R users this book is a classic:

Modern Applied Statistics with S http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-21706-2

This thread could be useful even if the Springer action was a mistake (or whatever) and the free books download facility has been withdrawn - because many people have mentioned book titles that they like. I, for one, was not aware of many of these titles, and my guess is that many others would be in the same position. So this thread is a useful resource. It would be great if readers who can, could vote this thread up for a day or two at least, so it stays visible until people get a bit of time to copy book titles to check out or buy later. Thanks.

This is so amazing. Thanks for sharing. Computer Science books before 2005 can be found using: http://link.springer.com/search?facet-content-type=%22Book%2...

I'm getting 0 results. Is that so?

Amazing! Right off the bad I found some great topics:

http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-6383-8 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-30241-1

Looked like great reads right off the bad. Thanks OP!

Maybe you already know this, but I think the phrase you're looking for is "right off the bat". I'm not really sure where it comes from though. Just thought you might want some stranger on the internet to correct your usage of idioms (seriously though; I'm not trying to be a dick, just trying to share some knowledge).

Better to learn mistakes sooner rather than later. Damned ego makes it tough either way though...

baseball analogy?

Yes! Thank you. I've never really thought about the phrase, despite having used it (probably) hundreds of times.

Woah, it's a treasure trove! I am definitely checking out some of the books mentioned in the thread :)

Unfortunately, some of the old and gold Springer books are available only in paper format like Shreve's Stochastic Calculus for Finance [0].

[0] http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9780387401003

FYI, Shreve's "Brownian Motion and Stochastic Calculus" book is available :

http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4684-0302-2

Can somebody please download them all and seed them?

AFAIK, they are still covered by copyright (they are just being sold for $0.00; so free as in beer) so we won't necessarily have the right to redistribute in any way we might like unless explicitly allowed.

That does not seem to currently be legal under the T&C, unfortunately.

In times like these I realize I just can't read all I want to read. There is so much it's overwhelming.

Read what you need. The rest will be there when you need it too... It's like being given an 'all you can eat' card with indefinite lifetime, only in this context the card should probably read 'all you can read' :)

Seems like demand was so high they had to kill it. I guess that’s what happens when you hit first page of HN, there must have been thousands of geeks downloading books by the dozens. Well it was good while it lasted. Managed to download a few books. Better luck next time/year.

Very cool. They've got one book in Italian, and I just started learning, maybe after my easy Berlitz, I'll try to learn some Italian and refresh some Mathematics at the same time.

Once again the internet has demonstrated it's ability to (semi-)autonomously heal damage and mis-configuration by replicating data from the faulty nodes. I trust the keepers of this valuable data will occasionally admire and validate these backups, replicate sparingly, and never profit except to enrich their knowledge. Guilty twinges may be eased by giving back to the nearest struggling technical book store in your area :)

My selected and slightly annotated list, primarily probability and statistics https://www.jyotirmoy.net/posts/2015-12-29-springer-openacce...

Does anyone have any list of "must-have" book recommendations for those who have access? Books that explain technical topics well? I'm thinking of topics ranging numerical simulation to ODEs to optimization to spectral graph theory to parsing etc.

Solving Ordinary Differential Equations II by Hairer and Wanner: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-05221-7

Most of these books were already available for free (but not legal) download at Library Genesis http://gen.lib.rus.ec/

That's good for fundamentals but most of the applied science is inevitably out of date. Would not waste too much time searching dustbins, then: trying novelty is more intriguing.

Some of you can point out some interesting book about distributed system ?

There are a lot of books about the subject but I don't know if those books are valid...

this announcement made my holidays even more wonderful. all i need now is sneak into a corner and start soaking up this treasure trove of knowledge.

Huh? I'm seeing 135 books there, total, including 4 in math.

Springer actually seems to offer >19,000 math books.

Is that the correct link? What am I missing?

Same here - was seeing 59 pages of stats books this morning, and only 2 books are in stats now.

Any suggestions?

Will we see the same thing from Elsevier?

No.

This is awesome! Does anyone know about cryptography in Springer? Any good 10 year old textbooks I should get?

Thank you, this made my time period. "Graphs and Networks (Transfinite and Nonstandard)" woo-hoo!

Umm, what happened? I clicked on a few of those titles below and its asking me to PAY!!!

:(

Information should be free.

Schneider's "Verification of Reactive Systems" is there and yuuummy.

i wonder how many books we all downloaded

i got

APL Programs for the Mathematics Classroom Norman Thomson

Arithmetic Geometry Edited by Gary Cornell

BASIC Game Plans Computer Games and Puzzles Programmed in BASIC

An APL Compiler Timothy Budd

The Chemical Bond Tadamasa Shida

Holub on Patterns: Learning Design Patterns by Looking at Code

Proofs from the Book

Anyone managed to crawl the site before prices appeared again? :P

This is pure money. Thanks for the link OP !

can someone share links of best CS books meeting this criteria?

offcourse not, retailers are very sensitive to matters of ethics like this.

wow this is pretty awesome

Why is there no announcement by Springer on this?

It ended for my IP. Don't know if they set a limit of books per IP, or it just ended? 4:53 a.m. Pacific time. Good while it lasted.

You know, you seem pretty out of touch.

You are comparing something free with a service that costs "couple of $100 bucks", more specifically $400/year for a subscription. If $400 is so little to you that you can just toss it aside that's all well and good, but that is not the case for a lot of people.. most of whom the subject of this post is aimed.

400$/y is not much for what you get from Safari books, and it's a minor expense for many professionals in the first world.

How is this even remotely the same? Most of the Safari catalog isn't textbooks and it's $400 (a couple would be 200 btw) a year.

a couple doesn't necessarily mean two, depending on where you are from. it can also be synonymous with "a few"

My local library card gives me full access to safari. Might be worth checking if yours does, too. ACM membership also gives access to a subset of safari.