They are not on Anna’s Archive or on MaM. They are available for digital purchase from SpringerPub or Amazon.
Is there a different tracker for textbooks and reference materials?
How likely is it that a request will be fulfilled. Would someone need to buy the book themself and upload it?
Not a perfect solution but when I needed specific obscure and/or new editions for coursework, I’d go check out my university library’s copy and photograph all the pages I needed
it’s common for universities to keep a reserve copy (or a few) of any books required by courses. access may be limited (e.g. at my school you could check them out only 2 hours at a time). If your library has a book scanning station your life will be easier so ask if they have one.
One time after class I ran into a classmate trying to do the exact same thing, so we ended up taking turns sharing scan photos to save ourselves time the rest of the semester. Be sure to share the love with any fellow ultra-broke classmates
happy sailing 🏴☠️
I was so pumped back then, when I learned where the book scanner in my university’s library was located. Although I never needed it for class itself, when you need to write some papers and needed some literature - just go to the library, get the book, put it on the scanner, copy all chapters you need and then rinse and repeat with the next book. No need to carry a fuckton of paper home to cite from or work for hours in the library. A single pen drive is enough for that.
You’ll also find that LLMs are actually quite useful in putting together scripts that will take all the photographed pages, and convert them to a proper EPUB format (using OCR, direct extraction of images, etc.), reducing the overall size and improving quality.
Visual models can even create custom CSS for you, and if there are graphs and such, LaTeX can be utilised as well.
All the tools exist separately and LLMs can write that binding glue easily.
Worth a try especially if the textbook is (regular) text heavy.