Electronic books and media
(See also the bookmarks on
the
aq.org home page.)
General
Collaborative ebooks
- At
Wikibooks (http://en.wikibooks.org/), “We are developing free, open content textbooks, manuals and
other texts. We currently have over 120 textbooks in various stages
of development, of which every page is open to
your revision and addition.”
- The
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/) is a collaboratively-developed free encyclopedia.
Other ebooks
Visual arts
Video
-
The Internet Archive and
Prelinger Archives are producing
an archive of public-domain or otherwise redistributable movies. (It's
theoretically also at
http://moviearchive.org/, but that link isn't working for me right now.)
-
Pocket Movies (http://www.pocketmovies.net/) is a site with various movies in MPEG format, including commercial
trailers and noncommercial work (like film-school projects).
Most of it is available in a couple different resolutions, and
the site is aimed at PocketPC users, although they play fine under
Linux (for instance with Xine,
mplayer, or the
mpeg_play included with the SDL library - sorry for not including links).
Pretty cool.
Audio
-
RadioLovers.com
(new) has old-time radio shows for free in MP3 format — stuff like
Flash Gordon,
Gunsmoke,
Benny Goodman, and so forth. US copyright law prior to 1973 seems to mean
that this stuff is in the public domain. Lots of stuff that’s
interesting, culturally important, and worth listening to, but
that would probably not have enough commercial value decades after
its production to be on the market if it were still under copyright.
(Nowadays, anything newly produced is automatically copyrighted,
and copyright lasts about a hundred years. Think what that
means for your great-grandchildren’s access to the stuff you’re
listening to now.)
Web content
- The main project of
the Internet Archive is to provide `snapshots' of Internet content, otherwise likely
to be somewhat ephemeral.
Magazine articles
- If, like me, you were first exposed to computing in the era
of 8-bit microcomputers like the TRS-80, Commodore Pet, and Apple
II, the
Classic Computer Magazine Archive (http://www.atarimagazines.com/) will be an exercise in nostalgia. It has the full text of
all issues of
Atari Magazine,
STart, and
Hi-Res, full text of several issues of
Creative Computing (the first computer magazine I read regularly), and some articles
from
Compute! and
Compute!'s Gazette, all with the permission of the publishers. Well, I think
it's cool, anyway.
Last modified 2009.05.18 by
js.