In 1960, NASA put its first “Earth-observing environmental satellite” into orbit, and, ever since, these satellites have let us observe the dynamics of our planet in a new way. They can tell us all about changing weather patterns, the impact of climate change, what’s happening in the oceans, the coastlines, rivers and more.
The satellites have also demonstrated again and again the Earth’s aesthetic beauty, revealed in the patterns, shapes, colors, and textures seen from space. That beauty is what gets celebrated in NASA Earth As Art, a new visual publication made available as a Free 160-Page eBook (PDF) and a Free iPad App. Featuring 75 images in total, the app gives you a very aerial look at places like the Himalayas, Arizona’s Painted Desert, the Lena River Delta in Russia (shown above), the Byrd Glacier in Antarctica, and much more. Enjoy the images, from the surreal to the sublime.
You’ll find NASA Earth As Art listed in our collection of Free eBooks. Also see these related NASA materials:
It’s surely worth giving you the quick heads up that, starting today, “the complete collection of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, both long and short, have been compiled together for the first time.” The Complete Sherlock Holmes (download it here)is free on the Kindle thanks to Simon & Schuster. Unlike many free texts, the formatting looks quite nice on my Kindle Paperwhite as well as on the iPad using the Free Kindle app. So, we’re gladly adding this one to our collection of 375 Free eBooks, which gives you immediate access to many more classics.
NOTE: We have unfortunately discovered that this particular text is not available in some countries. Sorry, there was no way for us to know that in advance. But, fear not, you can find other versions of Sherlock Holmes on the web. Give these links a try:
Doyle, Arthur Conan - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
We at Open Culture have discovered a handy piece of software that will make it easier to use our collection, 600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. Calibre is a free e‑book library management software that lets users convert e‑books from one format to another.
Say that you’ve downloaded Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in the open ePUB format and want to move the book onto your Kindle. Calibre can convert the text into all of the major e‑reader formats, including Kindle’s proprietary format. The program will then sync the text to your device and you’re good to go.
Calibre supports e‑book formats used by major manufacturers (including Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble and Sony), but if your device isn’t listed in the program’s list, Calibre’s “generic device” option will most likely do the job.
The program also offers a default viewer for reading texts on your computer, and books can be converted from one platform to another, making it easy to move books from your phone to iPad to laptop and beyond.
Calibre fills a niche for e‑book readers, providing a simple way to manage e‑libraries. The program also helps manage and organize online magazines, newspapers and other reading materials. Click “Fetch News” and Calibre will scan selected online news outlets and catalog them in your collection.
You can even buy books by using Calibre’s interface to search for the best price on a selected title.
Of the many resources you can explore, here’s one obvious highlight: MetPublications now makes available 397 out-of-print titles, including lots of informative and visually-packed art catalogs from the museum’s past exhibitions. You can read the books online or download them in PDF format (although I should warn you that the PDF downloads take some time, so be patient). When you rummage around, you’ll come across works like these and more:
It took five years and five models, but Amazon has finally released a new generation of the Kindle — the Kindle Paperwhite — that delivers the goods. The problem with the previous models boiled down to this. The screens were fairly muddy. The contrast, poor. The words didn’t pop off of the page. If you ever tried reading a Kindle indoors, especially in lower light conditions, you know what I mean.
With the Kindle Paperwhite, Amazon has made a pretty big leap ahead. They’ve made improvements to the font contrast and screen resolution, which definitely enhance the reading experience. They’ve also added a touchscreen to the e‑ink model. But the big stride forward is the built-in light that illuminates the screen. The screen is sidelit, not backlit (à la the iPad). The point of the light isn’t to make the screen glow like a computer screen. It’s to make the screen stay white, like the page of a book, under varying light conditions. If you move from brighter to dimmer lighting conditions, you nudge up the brightness so that the page continues to look white. And then you stop there.
It all works quite well, until you start reading with the Paperwhite in pretty dim light conditions. Then you’ll need to dial up the light until the screen actually glows, and that’s when you’ll start to see some imperfections in the design. As David Pogue mentioned in his New York Times review, the Paperwhite has some hotspots (areas of uneven lighting) along the bottom of the screen, which detract minorly from the reading experience.
The last thing Amazon got right is the price. The entry model starts at $119, which means that Amazon is basically selling the e‑reader at cost, and then making money on book sales. But that doesn’t mean that you need to spend very much. You can always download texts from our collection of 375 Free eBooks. Or, if you’re an Amazon Prime Member, you can borrow up to 180,000 books for free.
He describes himself as a “peripatetic patriarch of the free press,” and so he may be. John Wilcock, a British ex-pat who helped found the Village Voice in 1955 went to work as the New York Times’ travel editor. His Europe on $5 a Day was seminal in the travel guidebook publishing world. His subsequent Mexico on $5 a Day was a trailblazer.
Wilcock, who lives in California and publishes the online Ojai Orange, was the ultimate gadfly. His 1971 Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol included interviews with Nico, Lou Reed and other associates of the enigmatic artist. Wilcock was also a founding editor, with Warhol, of Interview Magazine in 1969. He accompanied Warhol out the night that the Velvet Underground played its first gig and wrote liner notes for Nico.
Published online in graphic novel form, John Wilcock: The New York Years chronicles this period in Wilcock’s life with an extensive interview and sumptuous cartoon illustrations by artists Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall. Chapters one and two are deliciously fun reading, as Wilcock recounts his arrival in New York City from England and his early interviews with Leonard Bernstein, Rock Hudson and Milton Berle and launching the Village Voice.
It’s an impressive site that captures the Bohemian circles Wilcock moved in. Persoff and Marshall have just released chapter three, which includes Wilcock’s time editing Norman Mailer and his interviews with actor Jean Shepherd and Marilyn Monroe. Stay tuned for more. Chapter three brings us up to 1957 so there should be plenty more to share.
Kate Rix is freelance writer. Find more of her work at
Last week, Amazon announced that it would start shipping a promising, new ebook reader in early October — the Kindle Paperwhite. The Paperwhite looks much like the old school, e‑ink Kindle that you know and maybe love. But this new model has a touchscreen and better contrasting fonts. Plus … drum roll … it sports a built-in light that evenly illuminates the screen, as you can see here. If Amazon can deliver on these promises, the new Kindle should be a pretty excellent deal, especially seeing that the cheapest model is priced at $119.
If you’re ready to splurge for an ebook reader, then we’re ready to do our part — to hook you up with Free eBooks. If you visit our collection, 600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices, you’ll find 600 great works. The list includes many classic masterpieces (Tolstoy’s War & Peace, Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis), but also more modern works by such authors as Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, and even Neil Gaiman.
If you’re an iPad/iPhone user, the download process is super easy. Just click the “iPad/iPhone” links and you’re good to go. Kindle and Nook users will generally want to click the “Kindle + Other Formats links” to download ebook files, but we’d suggest watching these instructional videos (Kindle — Nook) beforehand to take full advantage of the collection. And, if downloading files seems like a burden, fear not. We often give you the ability to simply read texts online. Find our full collection here: 600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices
PS When you return, you can always find this collection along the top navigation bar — where it says eBooks.
Recently, a video circulated—one of those weird Xtranormal creations that set text to stilted animation and robotic voices—entitled “So you want to get a Ph.D. in humanities.” It spawned a number of imitations, in other disciplines, of a similar scenario—a world-weary professor chipping away at a starry-eyed undergraduate’s naïve illusions about the world of academia. For a week or so, this meme had some of us wizened, grizzled doctoral students laughing through our tears while we hunched over keyboards and suffered through carpel tunnel syndrome and irrelevance. In his free and downloadable memoir, The Ph.D. Grind, author Philip J. Guo points out that such disparagement can serve a purpose—as commiseration for distressed insiders—but it hardly helps less jaded or experienced students and can be misleading and disingenuous.
In his preface, Guo promises to give clear-eyed advice, avoid too much geek-speak, and steer clear of “bitter whining.” Guo is an accomplished engineer at Google who received his Masters from MIT and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford. His memoir—written immediately after he finished his degree and therefore free, he claims, of what he calls “selective hindsight”—documents his experiences as a doctoral student over the course of six years. He offers the book as a practical manual for a variety of readers, including undergraduates, current Ph.D. students, professors and potential employers of Ph.D.s, and anyone genuinely curious about the nature of academic research.
The most immediately helpful part of the book is the Epilogue, which functions as a set of conclusions in which Guo lays out twenty of the most memorable lessons he learned during the years he narrates in the book. It’s all good advice and well worth reading his fuller explanation of each one. Here’s the short version of Guo’s “twenty lessons”:
Results trump intentions
Outputs trump inputs
Find relevant information
Create lucky opportunities
Play the game
Lead from below
Professors are human
Be well-liked
Pay some dues
Reject bad defaults
Know when to quit
Recover from failures
Ally with insiders
Give many talks
Sell, sell, sell
Generously provide help
Ask for help
Express true gratitude
Ideas beget ideas
Grind hard and smart
Notice that none of these relate directly to the arcana of Ph.D.-level computer science. While Guo certainly achieved a high degree of mastery in his field, his memoir demonstrates that, despite the intensive specialization of doctoral work and the precarious position of academic professionals in the current job market, completing a Ph.D. has many intangible benefits that well exceed the narrow goal of tenure-track employment. The full-text of Guo’s book is available in PDF here.
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