Tell HN: Free PDFs on MIT Press Open | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Free PDFs on MIT Press Open

33 pointstzhenghao8 comments

There's a bunch of MIT Press books [0] that are free (open access) to download for your own intellectual curiosity.

Just navigate to the book you'd like to read, click the Open Access tab and you're good to go.

[0] - https://mitpress.mit.edu/mit-press-open

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Ignore the “open access” in the page header.

1. Go to https://mitpress.mit.edu/mit-press-open

2. Select a book

3. Scroll to below the initial summary info until you see links for: - Overview - Author(s) - Open Access

4. Click Open Access

5. Click “Download PDF”

"Computational Psychiatry"

I can't seem to find the "Download PDF" link, in "Open Access", I only have links to view on PubPub.

Are only some books available for download?

Yes, seems like a small number of the books are available as PDFs.

Even so, I checked one of the ones on PubPub and it says the license is CC-BY-NC-ND; the Creative Commons FAQ says that format shifting is allowed even for a No Derivatives license (from what I understand), so you could presumably convert it if you want to.

Recommend downloading PDF of the highly regarded classic 'The Art of Prolog' by Leon S. Sterling and Ehud Y. Shapiro (2nd ed, 1994). https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/art-prolog-second-edition

OP is going to have to disambiguate what it means to "click the Open Access tab and you're good to go". It's easy to assume that means there be a PDF waiting there, or at least a link to get to it. I see nothing of the sort in Firefox or in Chrome browsers. There's an open access symbol but that's not an active link. My test case is this: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/category-theory-sciences linked from the top link

I opened your URL in Chrome, clicked on the "Open Access" tab, the clicked on "View HTML" under that, then clicked "Click to preview" under the thumbnail of the cover at the left. The "preview" seems to contain the full text of the book.

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