Free ebooks: new Doctorow novel +cognitive science and Lego robots

1. For the Win (2010) by Cory Doctorow
http://craphound.com/ftw/download/

2. From Bricks to Brains:
The Embodied Cognitive Science of LEGO Robots

by Michael Dawson, Brian Dupuis, and Michael Wilson (AU Press, 2010)

Available as a paperback or a PDF ebook
http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120175

About the Book

From Bricks to Brains introduces embodied cognitive science, and illustrates its foundational ideas through the construction and observation of LEGO Mindstorms
robots.

Discussing the characteristics that distinguish embodied cognitive science from classical cognitive science, From Bricks to Brains places a renewed emphasis
on sensing and acting, the importance of embodiment, the exploration of distributed notions of control, and the development of theories by synthesizing
simple systems and exploring their behaviour. Numerous examples are used to illustrate a key theme: the importance of an agent’s environment. Even simple
agents, such as LEGO robots, are capable of exhibiting complex behaviour when they can sense and affect the world around them.

The ePub format & why blind readers should care about it

ePub (Electronic Publication)
Filename extension: .epub 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB

ePub and DAISY share some similarities but they are different standards. ePub is designed to be the format that the trade (Bookstore) community uses for commercial ebooks and is overseen by the IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum). The current standard contains a DAISY book amongst its internal contents but this is typically locked up in the proprietary delivery format that the individual publishers and book distributors use.

To play DAISY materials you need a DAISY player and several of the commercial players play ePub along with several other formats. Unfortunately the eBook reader manufactures have not typically included a DAISY player in their devices or in their software, if they did you could also play DAISY materials on them. However, as there is a Daisy book and html files already in the ePub ebook, conversion software could be developed that could grab these files and extract them to make the ebook accessible (refer farther down this doc to read Arache's description of one of these conversion programs).
( more info about epub )