DejaVu
I feel no compunctions about downloading pdfs of scanned math books. For one, the price of a given math book is usually much more than is reasonable; for another, if the book is worth anything, I end up buying it anyhow, sooner or later.
It seems there is a better, and probably more used option, which is yet not as widely known as pdf: DejaVu, a free file format for storing raster documents that is tailored towards the efficient storage of scanned documents. In addition to being open, it outperforms PDF compression, and free viewers and browser plugins are available. Newsforge did a nice article on it a while back.
I’d appreciate any pointers on where to find books in DejaVu format.
Possibly relevant posts:
- MT Text-formatting engines (1/29/2004)
- Axiom vs other CASes (12/18/2003)
- Scanning in books (10/6/2004)
If copyright issues don’t bother you, then you can find lot of math books in DjVU format on P2P networks like Bittorrent and EDonkey2K. The clients I like to use for these networks are µTorrent and eMule respectively.
However, at least for scanned black-and-white books, the superiority of DjVU over PDF is dramatic only when the PDF file uses older compression algorithms. DjVU at best gives only a marginal improvement over PDF files compressed with the newer JBIG2 codec (here is one comparison. Unfortunately, there aren’t any mature, free, JBIG2 encoders yet. But once they arrive, DjVU is unlikely to survive. So, I would be wary of building up my pirate library in that format (though at the moment there are tools which will convert DjVU files to PDF).
Comment by AnonEcon — 12/24/2006 @ 8:02 pm
Point taken about PDF vs. DjVu, but my pirate library (nice term) is just for me, so I’ll take them however they come.
Comment by Alex — 12/25/2006 @ 4:22 pm
http://lib.org.by/
Comment by RJIH — 12/25/2006 @ 6:42 pm
Here is a link that I use a lot
http://ebooksclub.org/ they have a very nice collection of “free” books!
Comment by Russell — 12/26/2006 @ 5:36 am