Linked books

[gabrielsimoes]

Another concern is about the books hosted in e-maxx.ru. Will we host them at the project, or use the ones already hosted at e-maxx.ru? Will we link them at the pages, or not?

[bimalkant-lauhny]

I visited the page where download links to ebooks are available and tested a few. Guess they are working fine. I think it will be better if we just make a similar page for the e-maxx-eng and just link the download links from e-maxx.ru. In my opinion it will be just wastage of resources, if we host them at the project. Isn't it?

[tcNickolas]

I don't think it's a good idea from copyright point of view for an open source project to host non-libra books.

[gabrielsimoes]

I tend to think we should not link to books, except if they are free to use and share. Hosting might not me a good idea (even for free books).

[RodionGork]

I agree with Gabriel: e-maxx have somewhat alternative views on rights and copyrights, so if we recklessly provide all links, some users may unknowingly download certain materials which are not free at least in their country.

Linking books which are really free - is surely ok. If we need to host them somewhere, I can research for viable options. I vaguely remember github provides some special storage for large files - perhaps we can use it.

[bimalkant-lauhny]

@RodionGork I guess you're talking about Git Large File Storagehttps://git-lfs.github.com/!!! That's great... Looking forward to it.

[gabrielsimoes]

Also https://help.github.com/categories/managing-large-files/

[nalinbhardwaj]

Just wondering, would it be a good idea if for the time being we provide links to their copies sold on Amazon?

[tcNickolas]

@nalinbhardwaj If a book is sold on Amazon, I don't see how it could be a problem to find it there by hand using author and title. Amazon stores are country-specific (even between US and Canada), and the link which works for one country might not work for another.

[nalinbhardwaj]

@tcNickolas Amazon often allows previewing books i.e. one can read some parts of it online. Also, I am from India, and have noticed that if I open some page on amazon.com, it automatically suggests to redirect to same page on amazon.in(the India version). So that shouldn't be an issue. I just think adding links to the book would probably be helpful to the readers, and also give due credit and appreciation to authors as readers could easily purchase it. :)

[tcNickolas]

Reviving this discussion, I think we should start with just a list of useful books, no links for now, so that at least people have a starting point for search if they want to buy something (or download something from e-maxx.ru :-)).