"... a series of curated, open access books about life — with life understood both philosophically and biologically — which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences." Although they offer "frozen PDFs," these books—on topics like biosemiotics, animal experience, and air—are curated collections of links to open access science articles, reviews, interviews, podcasts, sometimes with embedded sounds and videos. They have ISBN numbers and editors vetted by the Open Humanities Press, which is generally a gold mine of interesting books and journals. They feel perfectly at home on the open internet, evoking hope and nostalgia for a flourishing academic world wide web, without paywalls and login screens.
The list of Living Books so far, with editors, and for the first few only (sorry!), an arbitrary quote from the editors' introduction, to give some indication:
Animal Experience
Leon Niemoczynski and Stephanie Theodorou
By examining the emotional lives of animals and how they are communicated, we hope to re-examine how human beings interact with, and relate to, other living creatures that are capable of experiencing emotional lives.
Another Technoscience is Possible — Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities
Gabriela Méndez Cota
...if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture.
Astrobiology and the Search for Life on Mars
Sarah Kember
On a note of pure speculation, I cannot help but wonder if a relatively stable era or phase of psychic realism will not be achieved until or unless we find – dead or alive – the first Martian microbe whose existence is not disputed and which is, if not strictly analogous, then at least related to our own. Our relationality with aliens, in other words, may need to be spelled out.
Bioethics™ — Life, Politics, Economics
Joanna Zylinska
(T)he preeminence of autonomy as an ethical value within bioethics is deeply related to the increasing commoditization of medicine in developed countries. For the more that medical practices are justified by reference to patient choice, the more that patients will be viewed as 'clients' and health care professionals perceived as 'service providers'.
Biosemiotics — Nature | Culture | Science | Semiosis
Wendy Wheeler
In a culture so close to log-jam with 'information', but low on meaning and purpose (aside from material profit), such a wider understanding of 'wealth' as richness of (bio)semiotic flexibility and responsiveness, rather than as mastery in terms of biopower, biopolitics and bioprofit, might go some way towards overcoming technological modernity's rigidifying disciplinary tendencies.
Cognition and Decision in Non-Human Biological Organisms
Steven Shaviro
What is the relationship between life and thought? Are all living organisms capable of thinking? Or is thought restricted to animals with nervous systems and brains? Or is it restricted only to human beings, or to us and a few of the other 'higher' animals?
Cosmetic Surgery — Medicine, Culture, Beauty
Bernadette Wegenstein
...cosmetic surgery is the quintessential expression of today's makeover discourse, a discourse whose primary dictum is bodily improvement—both moral and aesthetic.
Creative Evolution — Natural Selection and the Urge to Remix
Mark Amerika
Digitize Me, Visualize Me, Search Me — Open Science and its Discontents
Gary Hall
Energy Connections — Living Forces in Inter/Intra-Action
Manuela Rossini
Extinction
Claire Colebrook
Human Genomics — From Hypothetical Genes to Biological Materialisations
Kate O'Riordan
Life in Code and Software — Mediated Life in a Complex Computational Ecology
David M. Berry
Medianatures — the Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste
Jussi Parikka
Nerves of Perception — Motor and Sensory Experience in Neuroscience
Anna Munster
Neurofutures — Brain-Machine Interfaces and Collective Minds
Tim Lenoir
Partial Life
Oron Catts and Ionatt Zurr
Pharmacology
David Boothroyd
Symbiosis — Ecologies, Assemblages and Evolution
Janneke Adema and Pete Woodbridge
The in/visible
Clare Birchall
The Life of Air — Dwelling, Communicating, Manipulating
Monika Bakke
The Mediations of Consciousness
Alberto López Cuenca
The Unborn Human
Deborah Lupton
Ubiquitous Surveillance
David Parry
Veterinary Science — Humans, Animals and Health
Erica Fudge and Clare Palmer