Marvin Minsky's book "Society of mind" ebook
28 Jan 2016I was deeply saddened to hear of Marvin Minsky’s passing just this Sunday. Whenever a great man is gone, I am always filled with terrible guilt that I have not paid enough attention to his work and try to compensate quickly by studying up.
Furvuresly scanning the wikipedia.com entry for one of this books, I came up with “Society of mind”. The book immediately grabbed my attention, resonating with my own opinions on the inner working of a mind.
Unfortunately, the only online version I could find was a CC licensed HTML formatted version, mentioned in this Reddit post.
And so I took on the task of converting the HTML pages to some ebook formats, mainly so I could read it on my kindle.
The technical feat itself was not complex at all; basically, I passed the TOC page to quick & dirty spideyscrape.py, and then cleaned up the resulting “one page HTML” from any “per-page” headers/footers, fixed up chapter linking and downloaded the images. The actual ebooks were generated from the HTML with the use of the excellent calibre app.
For whoever is interested, the repo of the cleanup is here. The books are available in the same repo, in Epub, Mobi and PDF formats, under releases.