ResearchBuzz

The Freakonomics blog has a post about free books available online. The recent free release of a Suze Orman book was an example along with a few other ones.

The blog post in itself is interesting but the other resources pointed to in the comments make it even better — several other free book opportunities are noted including links to other lists.

If you’d like to explore how the world of the university press world is gettin’ free, try this search on Google or Yahoo along with your favorite keywords: “university press” free download site:edu . (I found doing a more general search like free book downloads or free ebooks brought a lot of junk.) You’ll get some irrelevant stuff, but you’ll also get pointers to small university presses which are making their books available online for free.

To get other general overviews of what’s available, try site:edu free book downloads “university press” oxford yale harvard. Though that search will give you a lot of table-of-contents downloads and portions of books. And too keep up with new options, try free books download “university press” inurl:2008 (The inurl: portion is because many blogs archive by date, and inurl:2008 is an easy way to find recent entries.)

PicAnswers LLC announced yesterday the launch of a picture question and answer site called, appropriately enough, PicAnswers ( http://picanswers.com/ ). I thought a site like this would be kind of pedestrian but as always the Internet amazes me with what it’ll ask questions about.

You’ll get the idea from the front page of the site — it’s like an answers site, with images. There are a series of pictures with questions attached to them. The pictures at the moment include what appear to be bones on a beach, what look like anime photoshopped llamas, an old tobacco can, and someone’s broken patio ceiling. The questions range from “Is this valuable?” to “What IS this?” and “How do I fix this?” Most of the questions I looked at had some kind of answer, and most of the time it was a useful answer.

The front page has the most recent question, with additional tabs for the most popular and most discussed questions (”Is this a toothpick or a food skewer?”) On the right there’s a tag cloud and on the left there’s categories for browsing. You can also do a keyword search; I did a search for “bird” and got questions from birdcages to bird eggs to a Ford Firebird that turned out to be a Thunderbird.

Some of the questions are, admittedly, very goofy, but a lot of them are useful and really not the kinds of questions you could ask without pictures (look in the Tools and Construction section of the site.) I would love to see RSS feeds for this site.

You probably have one or two rattling around in your garage or at the bottom of a knapsack: small books covering flora and fauna, how to identify and where to locate. In other words, field guides! I had no idea that there were so many field guides out there until I saw the International Field Guide site, which lists literally hundreds (thousands?) of them. It’s at http://www.library.uiuc.edu/bix/fieldguides/main.htm .

This site lists field guides in a number of categories, from plants to animals to astronomy to rocks. You can browse categories from the front page, or you can search. A full record search for trees found 552 results, from A Field Guide to the Acacias of Kenya to the simply-named Trees. Records contain author, title, publication details, description, region, and classification.

The database includes both titles that are in print and out of print, but unfortunately there’s no title link to Amazon, Google Books, or even WorldCat. If you find something here you want to follow up on — and I bet you will — you’ll have to go beyond the basic information this database offers. But what a fun browse! A tremendous amount of information in one place.