The free CK-12 Foundation Math/Science books. Free eBookMaps books - UPDATES

The CK12-FOUNDATION

With so many-books that are free for awhile, I thought it'd be good to remind people that the currently eight CK12-Foundation Kindle books at Amazon are always free.  They're "customizable, standards-aligned, free digital textbooks for K-12" and the subjects include Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

  UPDATE - Note that there are 11 books rather than 8.  In the comments section, AthenaAtDelphi found that doing a search on "ck-12" with the quote marks specifying just that, three more CK-12 books were found than when using Amazon's own Author's Link for CK-12 Foundation

  That's because those three books did not include "Foundation" in the author name.  The three more that he found that way are:
  1. CK-12 Engineering: An Introduction for High School , by Dale Baker
  2. CK-12 21st Century Physics: A Compilation of Contemporary and Emerging Technologies , by Andrew Jackson and James Batterson
  3. CK-12 People's Physics Book Version 2 , by James H. Dann

The CK-12 Foundation's "About" statement explains: "CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide.  Using an open-content, web-based collaborative model termed the 'FlexBook,' CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality educational content that will serve both as core text as well as provide an adaptive environment for learning through the FlexBook Platform™."

The ones at their site are in PDF format, not in best-reading format, so get the Kindle versions where available.

  UPDATE2 - a CAUTION - Stay with the Kindle copies when those are available of course.  More reason: Besides the fact that the PDF versions on the CK-12 site would be barely readable on a 6" e-ink screen, with headers, footers and many originally full-color illustratrions, Commenter Tom Semple found that some of the PDF books are huge, one of them 150 megs and another 500 megs (which is half a gig).

  We have about 3.2 Gigs (3,000+ Megs) of room on the Kindle 3's (and DX's), as the rest is for the operating system.   An average novel takes about 800K or just under 1MB.  That's quite a bit of room, but not when you're faced with loading extremely bloated PDFs of textbooks.  Those would be very slow on an e-Ink reader at the least, so if you need a CK-12 PDF book because no Kindle one is available for that one, just load the one PDF you need.  They can be backed up on your computer and moved to the Kindle as needed. &nbpsp;In the meantime, now we have 11 of the CK-12 books in the much more readable and lighter-weight Kindle editions.

  Thanks to both AthenaAtDelphi and Tom Semple for the added information.

  UPDATE3   I once mentioned you could get the often very useful Comments from this blog if you enjoy RSS feeds.  Using Google reader, for one example, (at http://reader.google.com to "Add a subscription" (there's a field at top left of that page for this), the following will work to add a subscription to comments-only with Google Reader and other readers:
http://kindleworld.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default


Back to CK-12:  CK-12’s FlexBooks earned perfect scores in Phase Two of former California Gov. Schwarzenegger’s Free Digital Textbook Initiative.

As ZDNet's Christopher Dawson wrote in 2009

' ... the efforts of the Foundation seem to have paid off, as they provided electronic textbooks through a California initiative that were clearly more aligned with state standards than any electronic texts from major publishers. According to a report from the California government,

Of the 16 free digital textbooks for high school math and science reviewed, ten meet at least 90 percent of California’s standards. Four meet 100 percent of standards, including the CK-12 Foundation’s CK-12 Single Variable Calculus, CK-12 Trigonometry, CK-12 Chemistry and Dr. H. Jerome Keisler’s Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach. '

And eight of these are free at Amazon, for the Kindle.


eBookMaps.com
Paul Biba announced this new website's offerings the other day, quoting its press release, which I'll add here also (all emphases mine):

' Free maps for readers of electronic books are now available on the new eBookMaps.com website.  The website, which presents itself in many languages, lets users download eBooks with maps in both popular formats, i.e., mobi (for Kindle reader from Amazon) and epub (for most other readers).

eBookMaps website offers free downloadable e-books with maps of major cities of the whole world.  Currently there are more than 200 eBooks, each in two formats – epub and mobi, among which are not lacking those of big US cities, cities of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and South America.

All the maps are optimized for e-book readers.  They are thus divided into many smaller parts that can easily be displayed on a small monochrome display with eInk technology.  To switch between different parts of the map users can use the buttons Next page/Previous page and they can also use index of streets, which is included in every e-book.

Maps from eBookMaps offer another choice of content for owners of e-book readers.  They can be useful as a good alternative to online maps, which may be expensive to download in many countries (due to telco fees).

Maps of some of the cities represented at eBookMaps are not yet common and are not available even on Google maps.  eBookMaps use data from Openstreetmap.org project licensed by CC-BY-SA and are distributed in accordance with this license. '

Here are their Tips and tricks for maps and e-books
Tips: How to load e-books with maps to your reader (there is a how-to video which displays the Kindle on the screenshot) and Help: How to use maps from eBookMaps.

The easiest method described is for the Kindle, which has a web browser.  With images as the main focus for these books, downloads to the Kindle could be expensive for Amazon (they pay the 3G cost) if 3G is your only method for direct download to the Kindle (true for Kindle 1, 2, DX, DXG).  The size of the Cairo book is only about twice the size of an average novel, but the size of the London file is 8 megs, 8 times the average novel.  It's a long download and costs can add up for Amazon, so it's better to encourage Amazon to keep the free 3G feature as they've done for 4 years, by using your home or local WiFi instead where you can, if you have the Kindle 3, OR download it to your computer and then move it to your Kindle's "documents" folder with the USB cord.

 They'll always be free, apparently, and most of us would usually download a book only as needed, so it shouldn't be a problem if done infrequently.

The books can also be placed in "My Kindle Content" subfolder of "My Documents" (on a Windows computer) and then can be read on your free Kindle for PC app as well, and the same, with different details, for Kindle for Mac.  But the Amazon versions are optimized by eBookMaps for the Kindle.


Things are really picking up in the e-reader world!


Kindle 3's   (UK: Kindle 3's)   K3 Special ($114)   K3-3G Special ($164)   DX Graphite

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Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.  Liked-books under $1
UK-Only: recently published non-classics, bestsellers, or £5 Max ones
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.