Textbook Revolution: Computer tools, PDF tools, and free software!

Computer tools, PDF tools, and free software!

First things first: Ebooks are a confusing mishmash of different file formats that don’t work well with each other. I hate this, and so do most others involved with ebooks. The Open Reader Consortium is working to fix this. The first reader using their standards is being developed by OSoft.

I could not have built this page without the outstanding free web-based research tool wURLdBook. It will take that confusing mess of bookmarks and RSS feeds that you have now and turn it into something you can really use. Thanks, Olav!
Everything I know about computers I learned from reading the Langalist. It’s a free subscription packed full of computer info twice a week and it will change your life for the better. Really.
Click here to download an Excel spreadsheet that lists dozens of the best free software programs, with links.
DonationCoders.com is a site with a twist. They give away their software, and if you like it, you donate money. They have some really great products, including Screenshot Captor, the finest screenshot program around.
Firefox is a free browser that beats Internet Explorer hands down.
Thunderbird, from the same people as Firefox, replaces MS Outlook.
Gmail, from Google, is free email that’s 10 times better than Hotmail. If you need an invitation, email invite AT textbookrevolution DOT org.
Open Office is a free replacement for MS Office.
Free Download Manager is the best way to speed up your downloading experience.
Want more free software? Here are links to the best of the best.
*http://www.handyarchive.com/free/free/

*http://www.forums.informationweek.com/jive3/thread.jspa?threadID=300050942&tstart=0

*http://www.thefreecountry.com/

*http://www.theopencd.sunsite.dk
Want to do more to your PDF files than just read them? Here are some tools that can help you:
*PDF995 is shareware that will let you manipulate your PDF’s to your heart’s content—This is essential stuff if you want to change the PDF files you find here to suit your class. Split, merge, extract to Word, and much more.

*PlanetPDF is a website with tons of free and paid software, as well as dozens of free PDF books

*Foxit offers several programs to manipulate PDF’s and a free alternative to Acrobat Reader:

*Go2PDF is a free PDF creator that claims to work with all document types.

*Cute PDF Writer is another well-reviewed free PDF Creator.

There are two for-profit websites that are doing some really cool stuff with textbooks and articles. I’d like to see this technology ported over to free books sometime soon.
First, from the good people at O’Reilly Publishing, there is Safari U, a very cool tool for professors that lets them take existing material, add their own content, and combine it all into a textbook that sells for only 16 cents a page. This is how ALL textbooks should be from now on! Right now it’s only for computer science stuff, but I’m hoping it will expand to other subjects very soon.
Second, there is Questia. It is an astonishing, if expensive, research tool for students in the humanities that lets them search, mark up, and read books and articles on line. I wish I’d had this in high school!