Free eBooks for Your PC, iPhone, Kindle & Beyond

in Amazon Kindle, e-books, iPhone, Literature, Most Popular | December 27th, 2009

Today, we’re rolling out a siz­able col­lec­tion of Free eBooks, most of them clas­sics, that fea­tures major works writ­ten by James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzger­ald, Jane Austen, Niet­zsche and oth­ers. (We have even thrown in a lit­tle Paulo Coel­ho.) You’ll find 100+ free ebooks in total, and you can down­load the texts to your com­put­er, smart phone (iPhone, Android, etc.) or Kin­dle, depend­ing on the for­mat you choose.  Our eBooks Primer overviews the dif­fer­ent down­load options, so please give it a quick read over. Below, we’ve post­ed a quick sam­ple from the new col­lec­tion (plus a link to the entire list of Free eBooks). Feel free to offer feed­back and share the list with friends. Down the road, you can always find this col­lec­tion in the top nav­i­ga­tion bar. Just looks for eBooks.

For more ebooks, please vis­it Free eBooks: Great Books on Your PC, iPhone, Kin­dle & Beyond

Note: Don’t for­get to check in on Seth Har­wood’s big Kin­dle exper­i­ment. What hap­pens when you sell your book for 99 cents on the Kin­dle? Find out as the exper­i­ment unfolds. Sto­ry here.

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10 Power Tools for Lifelong Learners

in Most Popular | December 2nd, 2009

Every now and then, we like to remind read­ers of the audio/video resources that Open Cul­ture makes avail­able to life­long learn­ers. These col­lec­tions are all free, and can be down­loaded to your com­put­ers and mp3 play­ers. When you add it all togeth­er, you will find thou­sands of hours of free edu­ca­tion­al con­tent here from qual­i­ty sources. If you have a chance, please
  • Free Audio Books:  This page con­tains a vast num­ber of free audio books, includ­ing many clas­sic works of fic­tion, non-fic­tion, and poet­ry. Jane Austen, Arthur Conan Doyle, F. Scott Fitzger­ald, James Joyce, Kaf­ka, Shake­speare, Orwell and much more. You can down­load them all straight to your com­put­er or mp3 play­er, then lis­ten any time. (On a relat­ed note, you might want to see our list of Life-Chang­ing Books, accord­ing to our read­ers.)
  • Free Cours­es from Major Uni­ver­si­ties: This list brings togeth­er over 250 free cours­es from lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing Stan­ford, Yale, MIT, UC Berke­ley, Oxford and beyond. The­ses full-fledged cours­es range across the human­i­ties, social sci­ences, and sci­ences, includ­ing com­put­er sci­ence. The page is a gold mine for life­long learn­ers.
  • Learn Lan­guages for Free: Span­ish, Eng­lish, Chi­nese & 37 Oth­er Lan­guages: Cen­tral­ized in one place are free lessons that will teach you 37 lan­guages. Span­ish, French, Ital­ian, Man­darin, Eng­lish, Japan­ese, Russ­ian, Dutch, even Finnish and Esperan­to — they’re all free and portable.
  • Free eBooks: Here’s a new col­lec­tion that fea­tures over 100 Free eBooks, most of them clas­sics, that you can access on your PC, smart phone (includ­ing iPhone), and Kin­dle.
  • Ideas & Cul­ture Programs/Podcasts:  In this one col­lec­tion, we have gath­ered togeth­er some of the most intel­lec­tu­al­ly stim­u­lat­ing pro­grams avail­able via pod­cast. The pro­grams will keep you think­ing and cul­tur­al­ly up-to-date, as will our col­lec­tion of sci­ence pod­casts. All can be down­loaded straight to your mp3 play­er.
  • The Best Intel­li­gent Video Sites: Where can you go to find intel­li­gent video? We have list­ed 46 web sites that fea­ture a steady stream of intel­li­gent con­tent: doc­u­men­taries, lec­tures, edu­ca­tion­al pro­gram­ming and much more.
  • Smart YouTube Col­lec­tions: It’s hard to sep­a­rate the wheat from the chaff on YouTube. But we have done it. Here you will find upwards of 100 YouTube chan­nels that reg­u­lar­ly serve up smart video con­tent.
  • Our YouTube Picks: Over the past few years, we have fea­tured sev­er­al hun­dred YouTube videos on Open Cul­ture. And some of the best ones we have brought togeth­er in our own YouTube chan­nel. You can sub­scribe to this col­lec­tion and watch new videos as we add them.
  • Great Clas­sic Movies: Our new movie col­lec­tion fea­tures land­mark films for the stu­dent of cin­e­ma. Here, you’ll find numer­ous Chap­lin films from the silent era, 12 Alfred Hitch­cock films, and many oth­er great works from the 1920s, 30, 40s and 50s. You’ll even find some great con­tem­po­rary films as well. Many of the great Amer­i­can direc­tors are rep­re­sent­ed here.
  • Open Cul­ture iPhone App: A lit­tle some­thing spe­cial for iPhone users. When you down­load our free iPhone app, you can take with you, wher­ev­er you go, many of the items list­ed above. Free Audio Books, Free Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es, Free Lan­guage Lessons, Music and Sci­ence Pod­casts, etc. Give it a try and tell a friend. Note, that per Apple’s require­ments, you will need access to Wi-Fi.

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Top Ten Reasons Why the Kindle Won’t Be an iPod for Books

in Amazon Kindle, Books, e-books, Most Popular | August 11th, 2009

A lit­tle side­bar to our pre­vi­ous post that won­ders whether Ama­zon’s Kin­dle can rev­o­lu­tion­ize the book indus­try…

1) When you buy an iPod, you can trans­fer all of your cur­rent music onto it. With Kin­dle you have to start buy­ing all new books.

2) The paper-form book (aka “dead tree ver­sion”) is still the best tech­nol­o­gy for read­ing: ful­ly portable, a nice thing to own and put on shelves, great for shar­ing, good in bed, at beach, etc. If you lose it or get it wet, no big deal—easily replace­able.

3) Music has con­stant­ly found new for­mats that improve on the old. Same for the iPod. It’s unques­tion­ably bet­ter than that big­ger, skip­ping CD play­er. Books haven’t been able to improve on the form for cen­turies.

4) Hold­ing 100 albums in your hand is great. Hold­ing 100 books? Not as much.

5) How often do you real­ly go away for so long that you need 10+ books? (Book­stores are every­where.)

6) Kin­dle is too expen­sive (see #1) and too big.

7) Books take much longer to con­sume, don’t work well in indi­vid­ual (shuf­fled) parts, and we often only read them once.

8.) Now that you can car­ry music on your phone, and the iPhone has bun­dled music, email, inter­net, and tele­phone in one small size, is any­one real­ly will­ing to buy a big­ger iPhone or Kin­dle just to read books on it?

9) Most of us spend more time lis­ten­ing to music than read­ing. We just do; it’s eas­i­er to do while we’re involved with oth­er things.

10) Books: they’re bet­ter!

Seth Har­wood pod­casts his ideas on the pub­lish­ing indus­try and his fic­tion for free at sethharwood.com. He is cur­rent­ly fig­ur­ing out how pub­lish­ers should best approach the new, emerg­ing e‑book mar­ket. Hear his ideas in his lat­est Hot Tub Cast™ and read them here soon. His first nov­el is JACK WAKES UP, in stores now.

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How I Sold My Book by Giving It Away

in Audio Books, Books, Most Popular | May 23rd, 2009

Today we’re fea­tur­ing a piece by Seth Har­wood, an inno­v­a­tive crime fic­tion writer who has used the tools of Web 2.0 to launch his writ­ing career. Below, he gives you an inside look at how he went from pod­cast­ing his books to land­ing a book deal with Ran­dom House. If you want to learn more about how writ­ers will increas­ing­ly build their careers, be sure to give this a read. Take it away Seth…

Before it ever hit print, my debut nov­el JACK WAKES UP was a free seri­al­ized audio­book.  And giv­ing my crime fic­tion away for free turned out to be the key to becom­ing a pub­lished author—that last piece of the puz­zle that eludes so many aspir­ing writ­ers. 

How did it work? Well, I got my MFA from a pres­ti­gious writ­ers’ work­shop.  I got a dozen sto­ries placed in lit­er­ary jour­nals.  In short, I was doing all the things “they” (the lit­er­ary estab­lish­ment) tell you you have to do in order to become a suc­cess­ful author.  And it wasn’t work­ing.  Agents were say­ing nice things about my crime fic­tion, but weren’t will­ing to take me on as a client.  Even­tu­al­ly I start­ed look­ing for anoth­er way to dri­ve my own career and put my work in front of peo­ple. Hav­ing had a lit­tle suc­cess with a pub­lished sto­ry online—my friends could read it and I was hear­ing from strangers who liked it, two things that had nev­er hap­pened with the dozen sto­ries I’d slaved to pub­lish in lit­er­ary journals—I could see that the web was the way to do this. But I couldn’t imag­ine any­one read­ing a nov­el online, or even on his or her com­put­er. I did have an iPod though, and didn’t I lis­ten to it all the time in the car and at the gym? Wasn’t I tak­ing out books on CD from my local library for my dri­ve to work? Sure I was. So when a friend showed me how he’d been using his iPod and a thing called pod­cast­ing to get free audio­books from an unknown author named Scott Sigler, I knew I had to fig­ure out how this was done.

Turns out that mak­ing MP3 files costs noth­ing. Dis­trib­ut­ing them costs me less than $10 a month, no mat­ter how many episodes go out. Each week, I release a free episode—usually a cou­ple of chapters—to thou­sands of sub­scribers. You can think of this as a throw­back to two old forms of crime dis­tri­b­u­tion: either the pulp mag­a­zines or the old-time radio plays that intro­duced detec­tive adven­tures to ear­ly lis­ten­ers on the radio. (more…)

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How Do You Use Open Courses?

in Most Popular, Online Courses, Random | April 14th, 2009

I was asked by a news­pa­per reporter today how peo­ple, like you, are using open uni­ver­si­ty cours­es (such as those found in our col­lec­tion of Free Cours­es). And the truth is, I’m not always sure. So I fig­ured, why not put the ques­tion out there and ask you. Here it goes: How are you using these cours­es? Are you lis­ten­ing to (or watch­ing) these cours­es pure­ly for per­son­al enrich­ment? Or are you spend­ing time with these cours­es for pro­fes­sion­al rea­sons? Are you try­ing to boost your resume/career with these cours­es? Also, dur­ing this reces­sion, are these cours­es sud­den­ly more attrac­tive? Or were they attrac­tive to you all along? Last­ly, what top­ics do you gen­er­al­ly tend to focus on? His­to­ry? Lit­er­a­ture? Com­put­er Sci­ence? Physics?

Ok, folks, give a hand and let me know your thoughts. Please feel free to write your thoughts in the com­ments below, or write us at mail [at] openculture.com.

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Blogs & Podcasts for the Financial Crisis

in Current Affairs, Economics, Most Popular | February 27th, 2009

There’s no doubt about it. We’re liv­ing in inter­est­ing times, as the Chi­nese curse goes, and they won’t be going away any time soon. Most of us can’t afford to ignore what’s hap­pen­ing here. So, below, I have high­light­ed a num­ber of blogs and pod­casts that help make intel­li­gent sense of this eco­nom­ic deba­cle. Here they go…

  • Plan­et Mon­ey: NPR is doing a great job of cov­er­ing the unwind­ing glob­al econ­o­my. The Plan­et Mon­ey blog is a good read, and it includes an essen­tial read­ing list. But the accom­pa­ny­ing pod­cast is one that I fol­low reg­u­lar­ly. It’s a must. And it’s gen­er­al­ly enter­tain­ing. You can access it here:  iTunes — Rss Feed — Web Site. (Note: the last episode is not the best exam­ple of what it’s usu­al­ly about.)
  • Econo­Talk: Econ­Talk was vot­ed “Best Pod­cast” in the 2008 Weblog Awards. Host­ed by Russ Roberts (out of George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty), the show “fea­tures one-on-one dis­cus­sions with an eclec­tic mix of authors, pro­fes­sors, Nobel Lau­re­ates, entre­pre­neurs, lead­ers of char­i­ties and busi­ness­es, and peo­ple on the street.” You can access the show via the fol­low­ing chan­nels: iTunes — RSS Feed — Web Site.
  • The Base­line Sce­nario: Ded­i­cat­ed to “explain­ing some of the key issues in the glob­al econ­o­my and devel­op­ing con­crete pol­i­cy pro­pos­als,” The Base­line Sce­nario is writ­ten, among oth­ers, by Simon John­son, for­mer chief econ­o­mist of the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund, who is now a pro­fes­sor at the MIT Sloan School of Man­age­ment. Although rel­a­tive­ly young, the blog has received a fair amount of acclaim as the finan­cial cri­sis has unfold­ed. You may want to par­tic­u­lar­ly check out their col­lec­tion of con­tent called Finan­cial Cri­sis for Begin­ners.
  • Real­time Eco­nom­ic Issues Watch:  Here, senior fel­lows of the Peter­son Insti­tute for Inter­na­tion­al Eco­nom­ics (a think tank based in Wash­ing­ton) “dis­cuss and debate their respons­es to glob­al eco­nom­ic and finan­cial devel­op­ments as they occur each day and offer insights that oth­ers might over­look.”  You will find some of the folks from the Peter­son Insti­tute also appear­ing on the pod­casts and blogs men­tioned else­where on this list. Find the RSS feed here.
  • Paul Krug­man: A Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty econ­o­mist, a Nobel Prize Win­ner, a New York Times op-ed writer, Paul Krug­man is blog­ging the glob­al finan­cial and eco­nom­ic cri­sis dai­ly. It’s an opin­ion that you can’t afford to take light­ly. You’ll also want to see his new­ly released book, The Return of Depres­sion Eco­nom­ics and the Cri­sis of 2008.
  • Econ­o­mists’ Forum: Run by the Finan­cial Times (UK), this blog brings togeth­er a large num­ber of econ­o­mists who offer a run­ning com­men­tary on the state of the frag­ile econ­o­my. The Wall Street Jour­nal has its own real time blog here.
  • New­sHour with Jim Lehrer: The PBS night­ly news pro­gram almost always includes an infor­ma­tive seg­ment ded­i­cat­ed to the finan­cial news of the day. The cov­er­age, which typ­i­cal­ly includes inter­views with experts, is excel­lent. You can down­load the pod­cast here: iTunes — Feed — Web Site
  • The Beck­er-Pos­ner Blog: While not updat­ed as fre­quent­ly as Krugman’s blog, The Beck­er-Pos­ner blog is a great place to read the thoughts of two Nobel prize win­ning econ­o­mists (Gary Deck­er and Richard Pos­ner) dis­cuss the cur­rent eco­nom­ic cri­sis. Thanks Bryce for the tip.
  • This Amer­i­can Life: One of NPR’s beloved pro­grams has offered some excel­lent cov­er­age of the finan­cial cri­sis. It start­ed with a show called The Giant Pool of Mon­ey (May 2008), and it has since includ­ed a pro­gram called Anoth­er Fright­en­ing Show about the Econ­o­my (Novem­ber 2008). Now there is a new one called Bad Bank, which explains what’s real­ly hap­pen­ing in the train­wrecks that are banks. These pro­grams were put togeth­er part­ly by mem­bers of the Plan­et Mon­ey pod­cast men­tioned above.

Are we miss­ing some­thing good? Please let us know in the com­ments below…

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Top 10 Blog Posts of 2008

in Most Popular | January 1st, 2009

Here they go, the most pop­u­lar posts of 2008:

10. Free Stan­ford Com­put­er Sci­ence & Engi­neer­ing Cours­es Now Online

9.) The Old Man and the Sea Ani­mat­ed

8.) Teach­ing on YouTube

7.) Turn Your iPod into a Trav­el Guide: 20 Trav­el Pod­casts

7.) Lis­ten­ing to Famous Poets Read­ing Their Own Work

6. This Amer­i­can Life Demys­ti­fies the Housing/Credit Cri­sis

5.) Under­stand­ing Mod­ern Physics: Down­load Leonard Susskind Video Lec­tures

4.) Yale Open Cours­es: The New Line­up

3.) George Orwell’s 1984: Down­load Free Audio Book Ver­sion

Also, James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Free Audio­book

2.) Top Five Col­lec­tions of Free Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es

1.) Intel­li­gent Life at YouTube: 80 Edu­ca­tion­al Video Col­lec­tions

 

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70 Signs of Intelligent Life at YouTube

in Google, Most Popular, Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Politics/Society, Video - Science, YouTube | July 11th, 2008

Smart video col­lec­tions keep appear­ing on YouTube. But rather anti­thet­i­cal to the ethos of its par­ent com­pa­ny (Google), YouTube unfor­tu­nate­ly makes these col­lec­tions dif­fi­cult to find. So we’ve decid­ed to do the job for them. These enriching/educational videos come from media out­lets, cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions, uni­ver­si­ties and non-prof­its. There are about 70 col­lec­tions in total, and the list will grow over time. If we’re miss­ing any­thing good, feel free to let us know, and we’ll hap­pi­ly add them. You can find the com­plete list below the jump.

Also, feel free to check out our YouTube playlist.

Gen­er­al

  • @GoogleTalks
    • Google has lots of famous vis­i­tors speak­ing at its head­quar­ters, and they’re all record­ed and neat­ly pre­sent­ed here.
  • Al Jazeera Eng­lish
    • The Mid­dle East­ern news ser­vice, which has gen­er­at­ed its share of con­tro­ver­sy, now airs broad­casts in Eng­lish and presents them here.
  • Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al
    • The lead­ing human rights orga­ni­za­tion brings you var­i­ous videos out­lin­ing human rights con­cerns across the globe, and the work they’re doing to improve con­di­tions.
  • BBC
    • A series of videos pro­mot­ing pro­grams com­ing out of Britain’s main media out­let. Unfor­tu­nate­ly many of these videos are short and not entire­ly sub­stan­tive. A missed oppor­tu­ni­ty.
  • BBC World­wide
    • Dit­to.
  • Big Think
    • This col­lec­tion brings you videos fea­tur­ing some of today’s lead­ing thinkers, movers and shak­ers.
  • Boing­Bo­ingTV
  • Brook­lyn Muse­um
    • A fair­ly rich line­up of videos explor­ing the col­lec­tions at Brook­lyn’s main art muse­um.
  • Char­lie Rose
    • PBS inter­view­er Char­lie Rose presents seg­ments of his night­ly inter­views.
  • Cit­i­zen Tube
    • YouTube’s own chan­nel presents videos deal­ing with the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal process and the 2008 elec­tion.
  • Com­put­er His­to­ry Muse­um
    • A good num­ber of videos that delve into com­put­ers, net­work­ing, and semi­con­duc­tors.
  • Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions
    • A resource designed to pro­vide insight into the com­plex inter­na­tion­al issues chal­leng­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers and cit­i­zens alike. (more…)

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