Back in June of 2011, we made almost all of our PDFs free for downloading, and it understandably got a lot of attention. But lost in the excitement was the fact that we’ve provided our reports for free since 1994 in the form of what we now call the OpenBook, which presents thousands of reports in their entirety for reading online.
Today, we’re excited to launch a new version of the OpenBook, where the purpose of the new look was to remove as much as we could so that the reading experience is as easy as possible. Instead of clicking through a book page-by-page, you’ll now scroll through chapters. The table of contents is available at any time, and you still go back and forth by page or jump to any individual page, but the emphasis is now on its primary purpose: reading our reports.
Give it a try. Go to page one of The Growth of Incarceration in the United States, chapter 7 of A Framework for K-12 Science Education, the introduction in On Being A Scientist, or search for another book. The OpenBook is available for almost all of the books published by NAP, so look for the “Read Online” button on each book’s page to start reading.
A few tips: you can share any page of any book using the paper airplane icon, and copying the address will give you a link back to the exact page you’re on. You can save bookmarks and notes with a MyNAP account. You can also switch back and forth between the original text as it appears in the print book, or a text version that’s optimized for web reading.
And maybe the best thing? It’s now much easier on the eyes when you’re reading on your tablet or mobile. We’re biased, but we think it’s as good of a reading experience as any e-reader out there.
One more thing: we’ve added a little Feedback button to the bottom of the page. If you have any thoughts at all on the OpenBook, please take a second to let us know your suggestions and experience. We thrive on feedback.
Happy reading!