Download the Universe: A Discerning Curator for Science eBooks

in Amazon Kindle, e-books, Education, iPad, Literature, Science | March 5th, 2013

download the universe

We all need guides for the over­whelm­ing world of the Inter­net. Dig­i­tal cura­tors are essen­tial to sift­ing through the vast and expand­ing sup­ply of online con­tent because they find the good stuff that’s worth check­ing out.

When Down­load the Uni­verse launched a year ago, the dig­i­tal world gained a smart and dis­cern­ing cura­tor for the grow­ing num­ber of sci­ence ebooks. What a boon for sci­ence lovers. Sci­ence lends itself unique­ly to apps and ebook pub­lish­ing. And doing what dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing does best, a good ebook can bring con­tent to life like no paper­back or hard­cov­er can.

fragile earth

Take Harp­er Collins’ Frag­ile Earth ($2.99 on iTunes), which came out orig­i­nal­ly as a glossy cof­fee table book. Loaded with before and after pho­tos of places on the plan­et scarred by defor­esta­tion and cli­mate change, the book was visu­al­ly stun­ning, if pedan­tic. But when released as an ebook, the whole expe­ri­ence unfold­ed like a beau­ti­ful, heart­break­ing origa­mi.

As Down­load the Uni­verse’s review of the Frag­ile Earth ebook  points out, the app ver­sion ben­e­fits from dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy, lay­ing before and after satel­lite images over one anoth­er, rather than side by side, mak­ing the expe­ri­ence of see­ing them  even more pro­found.

color uncovered

Here’s anoth­er one: Col­or Uncov­ered (free on iTunes), pro­duced by San Francisco’s Explorato­ri­um Muse­um, is a rich expe­ri­ence like a muse­um exhib­it itself. Com­bin­ing text with images and inter­ac­tive fea­tures, the ebook explores how the eye per­ceives col­or. The review­er, New York Times con­trib­u­tor Carl Zim­mer, uses his review to dis­cuss what the ebook expe­ri­ence shares with muse­um exhibits.

In the hands of Down­load the Uni­verse, it appears that ebook pub­lish­ing has matured into its own genre, with its own dis­tinct advan­tages.

blindsight

Some­times ebook pub­lish­ers don’t make good use of avail­able fea­tures. This review of Blind­sight by jour­nal­ist Chris Col­in notes that the book’s app ver­sion, telling the sto­ry of a tele­vi­sion direc­tor who suf­fers a brain injury, should have includ­ed neu­ro­log­i­cal back­ground infor­ma­tion in the main sto­ry, not as a sep­a­rate fea­ture.

Down­load the Uni­verse only reviews ebooks in the dig­i­tal uni­verse, not spin-offs from tra­di­tion­al print books. They look at Kin­dle prod­ucts, self-pub­lished pdf man­u­scripts and apps, and they’ve got top-notch tal­ent review­ing this brave new world on our behalf. The edi­to­r­i­al board includes some names you may well rec­og­nize, like Sean Car­roll (Cal­tech physi­cist), Steve Sil­ber­man (Wired), Mag­gie Koerth-Bak­er (Boing Boing), Annalee Newitz (io9), and David Dobbs (NYTimes, Nat Geo, etc.).

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

NASA Presents “The Earth as Art” in a Free eBook and Free iPad App

375 Free eBooks: Down­load to Kin­dle, iPad/iPhone & Nook 

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Read more of her work at .

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Learn to Build iPhone & iPad Apps with Stanford’s Free Course, Coding Together

in iPad, iPhone, Online Courses, Stanford | January 28th, 2013

Screen Shot 2013-01-28 at 1.01.26 PMJust a quick fyi. In the past week, Stan­ford has launched the lat­est ver­sion of Cod­ing Togeth­er, the pop­u­lar course that teach­es Stan­ford stu­dents — and now stu­dents world­wide — how to build apps for the iPhone and iPad. Taught by Paul Hegar­ty, the lat­est ver­sion of the free course focus­es on how to build apps in iOS 6, and the lec­tures will be grad­u­al­ly rolled onto iTunes from Jan­u­ary 22 through March 28. Find the first lec­tures here.

This course, along with oth­er top-flight cod­ing cours­es, appears in the Com­put­er Sci­ence sec­tion of our big col­lec­tion of 650 Free Online Cours­es, where you’ll also find cours­es on Phi­los­o­phy, His­to­ry, Physics and oth­er top­ics.

Look­ing for tuto­ri­als on build­ing apps in Android? Find them here.

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Watch Philip Glass Remix His Own Music—Then Try it Yourself With a New App

in Art, iPad, iPhone, Music, Video - Arts & Culture | January 18th, 2013

We told you in the fall about the album released by Beck and a troupe of oth­er musi­cians to cel­e­brate com­pos­er Philip Glass’s 75th birth­day. Rework—Philip Glass Remixed is a col­lec­tion of Glass works by artists includ­ing Beck, Tyondai Brax­ton, and Cor­nelius. Turns out that Glass him­self was pret­ty turned on by the results. In the above video, Glass plays around with his own music using an inter­ac­tive “Glass Machine” app, designed to com­ple­ment the album.

You can almost see the wheels in Glass’s head turn­ing as he swipes and taps away on the screen, cre­at­ing new loops with phras­es from his own music.

The app that Glass enjoys so much is avail­able to any­one with an iPad, iPod touch or iPhone (3Gs or new­er) and $10. The Rework app was designed by Scott Snibbe, who also cre­at­ed the inter­ac­tive galaxy in Bjork’s Bio­phil­ia app.

mzl_cunmodcg_320x480-75

The app includes eleven inter­ac­tive visu­al­iza­tions of remixed songs from the Rework album (exam­ple on left) and a Glass Machine, allow­ing users to cre­ate their own Glass-inspired music.

As Glass him­self said, while play­ing with the Machine, “the user has become the artist.”

Relat­ed Con­tent

Philip Glass, Seen and Heard Through the Cin­e­mat­ic Mind of Peter Green­away (1983)

‘The Bal­lad of the Skele­tons’: Allen Ginsberg’s 1996 Col­lab­o­ra­tion with Philip Glass and Paul McCart­ney

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Read more of her work at .  

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Fill Your New Kindle, iPad, iPhone with Free eBooks, Movies, Audio Books, Online Courses & More

in Amazon Kindle, Audio Books, e-books, iPad, Online Courses | December 25th, 2012

San­ta left a new Kin­dle, iPad or oth­er media play­er under your tree. He did his job. Now we’ll do ours. We’ll tell you how to fill those devices with free intel­li­gent media — great books, movies, cours­es, and all of the rest. And if you did­n’t get a new gad­get, fear not. You can access all of these mate­ri­als on the good old fash­ioned com­put­er. Here we go:

Free eBooks: You have always want­ed to read the great works. And now is your chance. When you dive into our Free eBooks col­lec­tion you will find 375 great works by some clas­sic writ­ers (Dick­ens, Dos­to­evsky, Shake­speare and Tol­stoy) and con­tem­po­rary writ­ers (F. Scott Fitzger­ald, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asi­mov, and Kurt Von­negut). The col­lec­tion also gives you access to the 51-vol­ume Har­vard Clas­sics.

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.

Free Audio Books: What bet­ter way to spend your free time than lis­ten­ing to some of the great­est books ever writ­ten? This page con­tains a vast num­ber of free audio books, includ­ing works by Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, George Orwell and more recent writ­ers — Ita­lo Calvi­no, Vladimir Nabokov, Ray­mond Carv­er, etc. You can down­load these clas­sic books straight to your gagdets, then lis­ten as you go.

[Note: If you’re look­ing for a con­tem­po­rary book, you can down­load one free audio book from Audible.com. Find details on Audi­ble’s no-strings-attached deal here.]

Free Online Cours­es: This list brings togeth­er over 600 free online cours­es from lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing Stan­ford, Yale, MIT, UC Berke­ley, Oxford and beyond. These full-fledged cours­es range across all dis­ci­plines — his­to­ry, physics, phi­los­o­phy, psy­chol­o­gy and beyond. Most all of these cours­es are avail­able in audio, and rough­ly 75% are avail­able in video. You can’t receive cred­its or cer­tifi­cates for these cours­es (click here for cours­es that do offer cer­tifi­cates. But the amount of per­son­al enrich­ment you will derive is immea­sur­able.

Free Movies: With a click of a mouse, or a tap of your touch screen, you will have access to 500 great movies. The col­lec­tion hosts many clas­sics, west­erns, indies, doc­u­men­taries, silent films and film noir favorites. It fea­tures work by some of our great direc­tors (Alfred Hitch­cock, Orson Welles, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stan­ley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch) and per­for­mances by cin­e­ma leg­ends: John Wayne, Jack Nichol­son, Audrey Hep­burn, Char­lie Chap­lin, and beyond. On this one page, you will find thou­sands of hours of cin­e­ma bliss.

Free Lan­guage Lessons: Per­haps learn­ing a new lan­guage is high on your list of 2013 New Year’s res­o­lu­tions. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 40 lan­guages, includ­ing Span­ish, French, Ital­ian, Man­darin, Eng­lish, Russ­ian, Dutch, even Finnish, Yid­dish and Esperan­to. These lessons are all free and ready to down­load.

Free Text­books: And one last item for the life­long learn­ers among you. We have scoured the web and pulled togeth­er a list of 150 Free Text­books. It’s a great resource par­tic­u­lar­ly if you’re look­ing to learn math, com­put­er sci­ence or physics on your own. There might be a dia­mond in the rough here for you.

Thank San­ta, maybe thank us, and enjoy that new device.…

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NASA Presents “The Earth as Art” in a Free eBook and Free iPad App

in Art, e-books, iPad, K-12, Science | December 20th, 2012

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:

NASA Archive Col­lects Great Time-Lapse Videos of our Plan­et

Ray Brad­bury Reads Mov­ing Poem on the Eve of NASA’s 1971 Mars Mis­sion

Great Cities at Night: Views from the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion

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Brian Eno Once Composed Music for Windows 95; Now He Lets You Create Music with an iPad App

in iPad, iPhone, Music, Technology | November 20th, 2012

Now run­ning through my speak­ers, even as I write this: Bri­an Eno’s lat­est album, Lux. The disc offers four pieces of ambi­ent music, a style that, even if Eno did­n’t tech­ni­cal­ly invent it, he cer­tain­ly took it to a new lev­el of fas­ci­na­tion and pop­u­lar­i­ty. He com­posed these tracks — if “com­posed” is indeed the word — as gen­er­a­tive music, a process rather than a style, but one he named and has pro­mot­ed since the nineties. For a def­i­n­i­tion of gen­er­a­tive music, I turn to Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appen­dices, a book that does not leave my night­stand. “One of my long-term inter­ests has been the inven­tion of ‘machines’ and ‘sys­tems,’ ” he writes, “to make music with mate­ri­als and process­es I spec­i­fied, but in com­bi­na­tions and inter­ac­tions I did not. My first released piece of this kind was Dis­creet Music (1975), in which two sim­ple melod­ic cycles of dif­fer­ent dura­tions sep­a­rate­ly repeat and are allowed to over­lay each oth­er arbi­trar­i­ly.”

In Lux, we have the lat­est iter­a­tion of that musi­cal mod­el. But even if this new record or its pre­de­ces­sors won’t make your playlist, there’s at least one Bri­an Eno com­po­si­tion with which you’ll already feel inti­mate­ly famil­iar. I refer, of course, to the Win­dows 95 start­up sound. Eno describes the musi­cal chal­lenge as fol­lows: “The thing from the agency said,‘We want a piece of music that is inspir­ing, uni­ver­sal, blah- blah, da-da-da, opti­mistic, futur­is­tic, sen­ti­men­tal, emo­tion­al,’ this whole list of adjec­tives, and then at the bot­tom it said ‘and it must be three and one quar­ter sec­onds long.’ ”

From that list of 150 vague words, Eno craft­ed 84 minia­ture pieces of music. You may have heard the one Microsoft ulti­mate­ly went with hun­dreds, or thou­sands, of times. Obvi­ous­ly they’ve sound­ed the same on every play, and this very fact dis­pleas­es their cre­ator, espe­cial­ly when he cre­ates with gen­er­a­tive sys­tems in the first place. “What I always want­ed to do was sell the sys­tem itself, so that a lis­ten­er would know that the music was always unique,” Eno con­tin­ues in A Year. “With com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy I began to think there might be a way of doing it.” Com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy, which has come a long way since the days of Win­dows 95, has brought us to the release of Scape, the first gen­er­a­tive music iPad app ($5.99) from Eno and Peter Chil­vers. “The idea is that you assem­ble pieces of music out of son­ic build­ing blocks — we call them ‘ele­ments’ — which then respond intel­li­gent­ly to each oth­er,” Eno says in the intro­duc­to­ry video just above. Scape fol­lows Bloom and Trope, the duo’s pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tive music apps for the iPhone. Does it strike you as strange that the man behind such an icon­ic Microsoft theme now releas­es apps only for Apple devices? It’s no big sur­prise: Eno even com­posed the Win­dows 95 sound on a Mac.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How David Byrne and Bri­an Eno Make Music Togeth­er: A Short Doc­u­men­tary

Bri­an Eno on Cre­at­ing Music and Art As Imag­i­nary Land­scapes (1989)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Calibre’s Open Source Software Makes It Easy to Read Free eBooks (and Much More)

in Amazon Kindle, e-books, iPad, iPhone, Software | October 25th, 2012

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.

You can down­load Cal­i­bre here and then start min­ing our ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion of Free eBooks.

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal cul­ture and edu­ca­tion. Find more of her work at .

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The Latest, Greatest Cultural Perk of Amazon Prime: Stream Movies and TV Shows to the iPad

in Amazon Kindle, Film, iPad | August 2nd, 2012

When Ama­zon launched Ama­zon Prime in 2005, it did­n’t offer that much in the way of ben­e­fits — just free ship­ping on Ama­zon goods. Now if you pony up $79 per year, you get some good cul­tur­al perks: You can bor­row over 145,000 e‑books and read them on your Kin­dle and devices with Kin­dle apps. What’s more, you can stream thou­sands of movies and TV shows through your com­put­er, select blu-ray play­ers and now … drum roll please .… the iPad. Just yes­ter­day, Ama­zon released its free iPad app, which means that Prime mem­bers can start stream­ing movies on their tablets right away. If you’re not a mem­ber, you can always try out a one month Free Tri­al to Ama­zon Prime. And if that does­n’t move you, you can sim­ply dive into our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Movies Online. Ars Tech­ni­ca has more details on the pros and cons of the app here.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.