Free textbooks online with Internet Archive

About 13 years ago, I wrote a blog post on here about using catalogs as textbooks. I still do that, but catalogs are fading — fewer companies create them. There are still some stellar examples, and web sites are sometimes serving that pedagogical role (e.g., Thorlabs’ excellent site, and series of videos).

And of course there are things like Wikipedia and other online resources. However, any serious researcher quickly hits the limit of these resources. Part of the problem is that web search is starting to fade in relevance– search results are inundated with garbage, and it’s hard to find high quality content using that approach. Recently, AI things like ChatGPT and Bing’s GPT4-based tool are offering an alternative approach, but that has limitations too, which I won’t delve into here. It suffices to say: sometimes you just want a textbook: an information-dense resource organized and written by one or more people with a bit of vision, and the motivation to create something of value. The process of writing a high quality text has not yet been automated. Maybe that will happen next week, but in the meantime, we turn to physical books. Conventional libraries are wonderful and deserve support from us all. Truly, they are the most civilized institutions our civilization has ever conceived and maintained. Still, it is sometimes handy to have an online resource to pull up textbooks quickly, from home, at all hours of the day and night, and my local library does not yet offer that. Enter, the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive has a lot of material, and it seems under-utilized. It’s not just old web pages, though that might be its most familiar operation. You can access the full content of many textbooks. Some old stuff is just there for anyone, but even the more recent items are easy to access with a free account (and you can login using your existing Google account if you want). For example, Hecht’s textbook Optics. Which I own, but it’s handy to access online, because I don’t travel with it, and I rarely move it between campus and home. And there’s more– the Internet Archive has tons of stuff!

Also texts on neuroscience, including journals and Kandel, Schwartz:

And I’m finding it handy for quickly referencing other textbooks…

This is a fantastic resource. I’d put it at the same tier as Wikipedia. Please give it a try, and donate if you find it useful.