Looks like Springer runs a open publishing model for books, with a fee charged to the author, as usual . My guess would be that they are seeding a bunch of these classic books to increase visibility of the open publishing scheme. And anyway, there's probably genlib copies of most of these floating around anyways...
Just to emphasize your comment: anyone looking to expand their knowledge should download pdfs and epubs from genlib/libgen (I pronounce it "libgen"). It's changed the way I read.
Now, if I have even a passing interest in a book, I download it and read the introduction. If I like it, I get it from the library. If I like my first reading, I buy the book.
The two things that have increased the range of my intellectual interests in 2015 have been libgen and twitter (where people more interesting than me talk about their research with others).
In America (the only country I'm familiar with), people are sued by the RIAA or MPAA for copyright infringement. I've never seen a pattern of lawsuits for pirating books[0]. So there's very little risk of getting caught.
If someone has a moral problem with my piracy, I'd reply that I'm a paying member of my local library and I purchase far more books than the average person. If someone has a moral problem with them personally pirating, I'd suggest trying it out. You'll be so happy that you'll retroactively justify your behavior. Like me!
[0] Exceptional cases like Aaron Swartz (who downloaded 1 million+ Jstor articles) do not a pattern make.
Um.. the second line says "I don't have a problem with this.." :)
I'm personally of the belief that locking up knowledge behind paywalls is a terribly backwards thing to do, but that's modern capitalism for you. I just wanted to call it out because some people are a lot more bothered by copyright infringement than others.
I'd appreciate some pointers to where this is too. I've tried some obvious keywords but it looks like I need to be very specific. My email's in my profile.
