I recently really enjoyed Art + DIY Electronics (https://archive.org/details/mit_press_book_9780262361576), which probably has a lot of relevance to the HN crowd and some great descriptions of projects like Laura Kikauka’s absurdist analog virtual reality suit Hairbrain 2000, pollution-hunting Feral Robotic Dogs adapted from secondhand toys by New York teens, and work by the Burning Man-adjacent Survival Research Laboratory.
Selling the American People (https://archive.org/details/mit_press_book_9780262374248) was also a great history of what you might call proto adtech, including things like ad execs hyping what they could do with '60s computers, Sears running analytics on when to send customers new catalogs, and '90s dreams of buying fashion from TV sitcoms. I didn't realize this one was free and actually bought the Kindle edition, which was well worth it.
Found this via Fedi and thought it could be of interest to the HN crowd.
“MIT Press maintains a set of their books that are listed as "Open Access", and of them, 297 different books and documents provide a helpful PDF edition of their titles.
I [Jason Scott] have ’ported’ these over to the Internet Archive where they live a life and have links back to their original MIT Press pages should you want to buy a hard copy”
A few months ago, I stumbled upon the fact that a bunch of MIT Press books that are listed on the Internet Archive have been relicensed, including some that aren't (currently) part of this collection. For example, the 1995 book World War II And The American Dream contains this Creative Commons dedication in the frontmatter[1]:
> This file has been authorized and provided by the publisher, The MIT Press, as part of its ongoing efforts to make available in digital form older
titles that are no longer readily available.
> This file is provided for non-commercial use through the Internet Archive under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. For more information please visit www.creativecommons.org.
The exact text of this notice can vary from book to book, and I have a hunch that I haven't seen all of them. Somewhat annoyingly, the status/metadata for these items hasn't been updated, so they are still listed as being limited preview titles, which requires you check them out and AFAIK also means their contents are not available for download (even though the Creative Commons license allows unlimited copies).
It seems they don't have all the books that are on MIT open access. I can't find "The Art of Prolog"[1], for example. But maybe they are downloading only the ones with the "free" tag like "Turtle Geometry"[2] (Last time I looked at this one it was one pdf for each chapter).
There's a lot of books here. I recommend this: https://archive.org/details/mit_press_book_9780262367851, it's using procedural generation to try creating houses similar to what Palladio created. The process of creating and tweaking the generation constraints is interesting and fun to follow. Like, it's hard to understand what all of the constraints are until you see it violated, and realize what went wrong.
This is amazing! Last time I checked (which admittedly was a while ago), MIT Press' website was pretty disorganized so it would have been difficult to find all of this.
FYI, downloading a file results in it being watermarked on every page (including covers) with the URL of the file, user name ("guest" if not logged in to an Internet Archive account), and date of download.
This happened to both PDF and EPUB files I downloaded. Woe to those who use screen readers.
I expected this to be just a few items. No, the archive.org collection is 297 items. Most from 2019 and more recent but some decades older.Good to see!
I recently really enjoyed Art + DIY Electronics (https://archive.org/details/mit_press_book_9780262361576), which probably has a lot of relevance to the HN crowd and some great descriptions of projects like Laura Kikauka’s absurdist analog virtual reality suit Hairbrain 2000, pollution-hunting Feral Robotic Dogs adapted from secondhand toys by New York teens, and work by the Burning Man-adjacent Survival Research Laboratory.
Selling the American People (https://archive.org/details/mit_press_book_9780262374248) was also a great history of what you might call proto adtech, including things like ad execs hyping what they could do with '60s computers, Sears running analytics on when to send customers new catalogs, and '90s dreams of buying fashion from TV sitcoms. I didn't realize this one was free and actually bought the Kindle edition, which was well worth it.
Balkan Cyberia (https://archive.org/details/mit_press_book_9780262373265) also looks fascinating for anyone interested in Eastern bloc computer history.