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tonyPick [soylentnews.org] writes:

Spotted at Hackernews [ycombinator.com], Lifehacker [lifehacker.com] and Good E-Reader [goodereader.com] is the report that the publisher Springer Science+Business Media has made more than 50,000 digital textbooks available for free download

Springer has made all digital textbooks more than 10 years old available for free on their website. This equates to thousands of important texts that range in disciplines from cognitive learning to pattern recognition through mathematics.

There has been a ton of conjecture on what free actually means, Springer has cleared the air by updating their terms of service. The company states they are for “You may solely for private, educational, personal, scientific, or research purposes access, browse, view, display, search, download and print the Content.

The book downloads appear to be plain, DRM-free pdf files [springer.com] and the site also works without javascript, offering direct download links. More information on Springer is available on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].

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