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Originally Posted by Gavin
Thanx for sharing mate 
Given some of the hostnames of where the books are stored, it makes me wonder about the legalities of it. Ahh well.. Enjoy it while we can. |
Perhaps it depends on where you look, but to me it looks like many of the books are made available by the authors after they went out of print. So you get comments like the following:
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The above book (originally published in 1994 by Ellis Horwood) is now out of print. The copyright now resides with the editors who have decided to make the material freely available on the web.
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Others are conference proceedings or 'lecture notes'
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The book aims to provide a modern approach to information retrieval from a computer science perspective. It is based on a course we have been teaching in various forms at Stanford University and at the University of Stuttgart. The latest incarnations are here and here.
We'd be pleased to get feedback about how this book works out as a textbook, what is missing, or covered in too much detail, or what is simply wrong.
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Book. A preliminary version of the book is available for download. We are currently revising individual chapters and will update this site frequently. The book will remain online after its publication by Cambridge UP in 2008.
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Basically, a lot of them are books aimed at the academic community which are written or compiled for dissemination rather than profit.