
Free Springer math books - DanielRibeiro
https://gist.github.com/bishboria/8326b17bbd652f34566a
======
HillRat
Link to Springer's main open access page:
([http://www.springeropen.com/books](http://www.springeropen.com/books)). More
than math texts up there!

~~~
patrickyeon
Very true, I see >56,000 English-language books that seem to be available for
free ( [http://link.springer.com/search?facet-content-
type=%22Book%2...](http://link.springer.com/search?facet-content-
type=%22Book%22&showAll=false&facet-language=%22En%22) ).

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tomtoise
Is there a way to scrape these programatically? I feel like it'd be a useful
repository to have stashed away for whatever future reason.

~~~
jlarocco
Why? I can understand downloading a few that look interesting, or asking for
permission to mirror them, but blindly downloading all of them seems like
hoarding.

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TeMPOraL
Call it "creating a local cache in case the service goes down" (and it most
definitely will). "Hoarding" is the _normal_ thing you do when dealing with
digital stuff.

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thebear
Guess there won't be a royalty check for me this year.

[http://tinyurl.com/hmwpf8e](http://tinyurl.com/hmwpf8e)

I'm totally fine with having our book available for free; actually, I prefer
it that way. Yet I find it a bit odd that Springer never even notified any of
the authors. I suppose as copyright owners, they can do that.

~~~
sireat
How much of a royalty are we talking about in say 2014? Enough for a cup of
coffee or for a used VW Golf?

I know that it is rare for modern programming books to make much money for
their authors. Thus I imagine for a highly specialized math book it would be
even rare.

~~~
thebear
After the initial excitement ;-) had settled down in the mid-nineties, it was,
on order of magnitude, about $100 per year. Every once in a while, an
interested mathematician would buy a copy. Other than that, in order to sell
such a book, there has to be a graduate level class on the subject at some
university (attended typically by about 5 people), and the teacher has to pick
your book over a handful of other options.

I haven't kept track of the grand total that I made off the book, but it would
certainly be a rather crappy used VW Golf.

I am so far removed from academia now that I have never thought about how I
would publish a book like that today. My first impulse would be to make it a
free ebook. Web search for "free course textbooks" indicates that this is not
unheard of. Does anyone know how common it is, at various levels of higher
education?

~~~
spike021
From what I've experienced, it's common to have mostly expensive texts (for
undergrad level) that can reach upwards of $175. Occasionally there are free
texts from professors at other universities, or just authors in general. But
more often than not they're quite pricey.

Free would be great! I think a lot of students go the alternative route and
torrent books or just Google to find their respective .pdf's without paying
after they see the price tag at the campus store/amazon/ebay.

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mindcrime
You know, I'm not exactly a huge Springer fan, much the same as many HN'ers I
expect. But I do believe in "giving the Devil his due", if you will. And this
is pretty freaking cool. I mean, yeah, sure you can probably find most or all
of this stuff using Libgen or torrents, but for Springer to put this much
great stuff out there for free, legitimately, is mondo bodacious.

~~~
LordHog
Why are Springer books bad?

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mindcrime
Oh, I don't mean to besmirch the quality of the _content_ of their books. It's
not the books that people dislike, it's the company and some of their business
practices - epecially the journal publishing side of things.

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fermigier
Anyone knows why Springer made all these books free ? Is there a backstory to
it ?

~~~
sdenton4
Looks like Springer runs a open publishing model for books, with a fee charged
to the author, as usual . My guess would be that they are seeding a bunch of
these classic books to increase visibility of the open publishing scheme. And
anyway, there's probably genlib copies of most of these floating around
anyways...

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digler999
there's an excellent torrent of springer books out there, about 12gb.

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i336_
I'd appreciate some pointers to where this is too. I've tried some obvious
keywords but it looks like I need to be very specific. My email's in my
profile.

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kevindeasis
A gift that keeps on giving. Some are under an OA license. This is incredible.

Does anyone know if there any backup/mirror links available, just in case that
hosting server shuts down?

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jesuslop
Includes Categories for the Working Mathematician by Mac Lane.

~~~
cies
Came here to post this as well..

Here the link to the 2nd edition (it also has the first edition in the
collection):

[http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-1-4757-4721...](http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-1-4757-4721-8.pdf)

More on category theory --but more for a programmer's usecase-- here:

[https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-textbook-for-
Category...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-textbook-for-Category-
theory)

And here:

[http://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-
pr...](http://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-programmers-
the-preface/)

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nevi-me
My last math was in high school, and I'd like to spend more time learning in
the coming year. I often read research papers, and the biggest challenge for
me is the notation. I can understand the stuff around set theory, and a bit of
the sigma notation here and there.

What I'd like is a proper introduction so I can start learning properly. Any
book one would recommend? I'm keen on buying if it's not on the Springer list.
Thanks in advance.

~~~
fao_
'What Is Mathematics?' Second Edition by Courant, Robbins & Stewart[0] is a
great introduction to Mathematics in general (And covers most of the main
fields), but also (iirc) is good at describing the notation used. As well as
that I find Wolfram Alpha[1] and Math As Code[2] good at describing some
pieces of notation.

Other introductory books I've found very useful are the 'Dover Books on
Mathematics' introductions series, I've found their graph theory[3] and
topology[4] books rather concise and clear to read -- to my knowledge they're
availible at archive.org in the collection 'folkscanomy mathematics'[5].

[0]: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mathematics-Elementary-Approach-
Meth...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mathematics-Elementary-Approach-Methods-
Paperbacks/dp/0195105192/)

[1]: [https://www.wolframalpha.com/](https://www.wolframalpha.com/)

[2]: [https://github.com/Jam3/math-as-code](https://github.com/Jam3/math-as-
code)

[3]:
[https://archive.org/details/IntroductionToGraphTheory](https://archive.org/details/IntroductionToGraphTheory)

[4]:
[https://archive.org/details/IntroductionToTopology](https://archive.org/details/IntroductionToTopology)

[5]:
[https://archive.org/details/folkscanomy_mathematics](https://archive.org/details/folkscanomy_mathematics)

~~~
nevi-me
Thanks for the info, I am going to have a look at them and see where the road
leads

~~~
fao_
No problem, happy to help :D

Good luck!

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aswanson
Thanks, you saved untold fortunes I was planning on surrendering to Bezos in
pursuit of these tomes of arcane magic.

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queeerkopf
They seem to have made available almost their complete catalog up to and
including 2004: [http://link.springer.com/search?showAll=false&facet-
content-...](http://link.springer.com/search?showAll=false&facet-content-
type=%22Book%22&date-facet-mode=between&facet-start-year=1815&previous-start-
year=1815&facet-end-year=2004&previous-end-year=2016)

This search yields 110 041 results across all disciplines covered by springer
that should be free to download in complete. Only 11 451 books from the same
time range are 'preview-only'.

I'm not certain that this is intentional. I haven't found any statement by
Springer that they make available all ebooks older than 10 years. Does anyone
know more?

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fibo
Thank you for sharing, mathematician writing here: all topics and content
looks really great

~~~
pmiller2
I was about to post the same thing. Some of these books are among the best
textbooks for their subjects.

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sophusSU
Seems like they shut down this service.

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GFK_of_xmaspast
Springer's got an incredible number of free texts up there, including over
3000 volumes in the "Lecture Notes in Mathematics" series.

~~~
mrcactu5
lecture notes in mathematics is NOT free. they are making me buy

[http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-22704-7_1](http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-22704-7_1)

~~~
tomku
Only texts published >10 years ago (2004 or earlier) are free.

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mrcactu5
Wow. I been looking all over for this:
[http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/3-540-44890-X](http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/3-540-44890-X)

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noobermin
Random Question. What are the prospects for someone entering graduate school
in mathematics, say if they have a post graduate degree in another STEM field,
later in life? Assuming they can take the math GRE and score well?

~~~
EliRivers
I completed a masters in physics my first time around, and over a decade later
decided to do a masters in maths (which I completed).

On my own experiences, if you're willing to put the hours in, the prospects
are pretty good. Maths isn't magic, and I found there wasn't much at the
standard masters level that couldn't be at least managed (if not mastered)
with significant but not superhuman effort.

I've no idea about math GREs; I'm in the UK.

~~~
noobermin
May I ask further, what field? Is it more applied or theoretical (I guess that
is answered by the field).

~~~
EliRivers
Given the context of this thread, let me say my chosen specialisations in the
Physics were generally not towards the frightening mathematics end of the
spectrum (and without naming specific subjects, the lowest score I achieved in
my entire life on any exam was in a maths heavy exam in the final year of my
formal physics education). I was not a mathematical wunderkind.

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chaitanyav
link to browse the books

[http://link.springer.com/search/page/2?facet-content-
type=%2...](http://link.springer.com/search/page/2?facet-content-
type=%22Book%22&date-facet-mode=between&facet-end-year=2004&facet-
language=%22En%22&sortOrder=oldestFirst&facet-
discipline=%22Mathematics%22&facet-start-year=1858)

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hellofunk
Why are so many of the books listed 2 or 3 times with the same title but
different filename? Are they different versions or just redundant copies?

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tzs
It says near the top that "duplicates = multiple editions".

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pervycreeper
Can anyone explain how to differentiate between the multiple instances of the
same titles? Is there a difference?

~~~
jlarocco
The first line of text after the first heading is "duplicates = multiple
editions".

Labeling them or adding " (first edition)" to the title would've been nice,
though.

