The Univesity of Chicago offers one book each month for free. IMO, they’ve ranged from awesome to kind of odd, but always have provoked a bit of thought. This month’s book (Nov 2021) is Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet by Sarah Elton, which appears to be pretty much what you might guess from the title:
“By 2050, the world population is expected to reach nine billion. And the challenge of feeding this rapidly growing population is being made greater by climate change, which will increasingly wreak havoc on the way we produce our food. In Consumed, Sarah Elton walks fields and farms on three continents, not only investigating the very real threats to our food, but also telling the little-known stories of the people who are working against time to create a new and hopeful future.”
You do have to give UChi your email address, but they are pretty respectful of it, and only send the very occasional email – not nearly enough to be offensive.
Get the free book here: UChi Press
I’ll come back and add next month’s free book in the comments to this post, so keep an eye out here!
January’s free book is The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet by Michael Ruse. The link in the OP is still good…
Guess it’s been a while since I posted the University of Chicago free book…sigh!
Oh well, October’s book is Bats: A World of Science and Mystery by M Brock Fenton and Nancy B Simmons.
The link and instructions in the OP are still good!
January’s free e-book from the University of Chicago press looks really interesting (to me, at least). It’s A Natural History of Time by Pascal Richet, and here’s the blurb:
It’s available at https://press.uchicago.edu/books/freeEbook.html
The University of Chicago Press free book for Feb 2023 is Troublemakers: Chicago Freedom Struggles through the Lens of Art Shay by Erik S Gellman and Art Shay. Per its blurb, this features 250 photos by Art Shay with Gellman’s accompanying commentary.
As always you have to give UChi Press your email address, but they don’t abuse it. The link in the comment just above is still good.
And, they also have a sale going on right now, which is supposedly running through June 15, 2023. Which starts to sound more like pricing decisions, and less like a sale…but what do I know. Info is here: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/virtualCatalog/vc60.html
Looks as if the University of Chicago Press is doing two free books this month. Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side by Eve L Ewing is free this month with a coupon code, in honor of Black history month.
Here’s the info on how to get it from the email that I got. It’s nice that they offer an ePub of this one also – many UChi books are PDF only…
Link to book webpage: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo27506579.html
The free book this month from the University of Chicago Press is Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine, by Angela NH Creager. It’s available from the usual webpage: https://press.uchicago.edu/books/freeEbook.html
August’s free book, good for two more days, is Memory: Fragments of a Modern History by Alison Winter. As always, the webpage to request the book is: https://press.uchicago.edu/books/freeEbook.html. And then you have more time to actually download it, once you get the emailed link.