Sparknotes pdf free download

At this time of year, students are buying textbooks and looking for ways to avoid reading them.

Nothing is new about that. CliffsNotes guides, with their familiar yellow and black covers, have been in book bags since 1958.

What has changed is how many study guides, or cheat sheets, are available online and on mobile phones. Whether you know them as CliffsNotes, SparkNotes or Shmoop, these seemingly ubiquitous guides are now, in many cases, free.

“Two to three years ago, the wisdom was that students do research online, but not study online,” said Emily Sawtell, a founder of McGraw-Hill’s online collaborative study site called GradeGuru. “That has changed in the last 12 months.” Ms. Sawtell said she had tracked a significant increase in the search term “study guide” on Google.

Professors warn that these guides are no substitutes for reading great works of literature, but concede, grudgingly, that as an adjunct, they can stimulate thought and deepen insight.

“The problem is when you use a study guide in place of the original book,” said Cary Nelson, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and president of the American Association of University Professors. “Then they have knowledge that is not just superficial, but wrong.”

Carl Fisher, chairman of the comparative world literature and classics department at California State University, Long Beach, agreed to review the many offerings, starting with the oldest. CliffsNotes guides cover not only literature, but also foreign languages, math, science, history and other topics, and many of the guides are free online.

In booklet form, 159 literature study guides are available, costing about $6 to $10 each. But more than 250 are available online, and all can be viewed free. Downloading them as PDF files costs $5 to $10 each. A comparatively paltry 39 CliffsNotes for literature are available for mobile at $1.99 each for the iPhone.

CliffsNotes, owned by Wiley Publishing, also offers free podcasts called CramCasts, which are three- to five-minute overviews of books with a plot summary.

“CliffsNotes is one of the most thorough, one of the most insightful,” Professor Fisher said. “If a student wanted to use it along with the text, it would be worthwhile.” He liked that, for some books, the complete text was included with the study guide on line. But CliffsNotes lost points for some dated writing. He looked at notes describing “Candide” in terms of Voltaire’s life and said: “No one does biographical criticism anymore. They haven’t since the 1970s.”

SparkNotes, which is owned by Barnes & Noble and began in 1999, is a newcomer compared with CliffsNotes, but it is well established with today’s students. It offers a library of 690 guides, including literature, math, history and biology, all free on the Web.

Most of the guides are available as e-books for Barnes & Noble’s electronic reader, the Nook, or any device that runs Nook software, which is available for BlackBerrys and iPhones, and handsets with Google’s Android operating system. The electronic editions of the guides and downloadable PDFs are $4.95. The No Fear Shakespeare series, which offers a modern translation next to the original texts, costs $4.99 for each guide. While those are not available as downloadable PDFs, they are available on iTunes for $4.99 each.

About 150 of the SparkNotes are still available in book form for $4.95 each, and the book form of No Fear Shakespeare costs $5.35.

Professor Fisher said SparkNotes’ analysis was more contemporary than that offered on some of the other sites. “It is a generally useful, more nuanced interpretation than the others. Of all the ones I looked at, I’d probably say SparkNotes is the best choice,” he said.

Shmoop, though, is the newcomer. It has been online for only 18 months. It has set itself apart from the stalwarts by synopsizing the expected canon, like Camus’s “The Stranger” and Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” as well as by analyzing more contemporary and popular culture works. Among its 600 study guides are guides for best sellers like Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl Who Played With Fire” and song lyrics like Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi,” which it likens to “The Great Gatsby,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” Though Shmoop says the authors come “from Ph.D. and masters’ programs at Stanford, Harvard, U.C. Berkeley and other top universities” the site still misspelled the last name of Virginia Woolf, the English author. Guides on topics like civics and economics also are available.

All of the guides are free online. They are also available for 99 cents to $2.99 for the Sony Reader, Kindle and Nook e-readers and iPhone, Android and BlackBerry smartphones using the Nook reader app. Shmoop also sells PDF versions for $5. Study guides for Advanced Placement and college entrance exams are $10 to $25.

Dr. Fisher liked the idea behind Shmoop’s “Why Should I care?” section. It explains the satire in “Candide” by comparing it to modern satires like “The Simpsons” and “The Family Guy.” The problem, he said, is that the writing strains to relate to students. “It makes an interesting attempt to be hip,” he said, “but it is just so high school-y.”

GradeSaver boasts that a majority of its authors are Ivy League-educated. The site offers more than 400 guides covering literature, poetry and short stories, with two film guides. Professor Fisher said that the writing was among the best. “It is quite readable, if you can get around the blue jeans ads, which are right in the middle of the text.”

The site specializes in essays. It sells copies of 712 college essays that the site said landed the authors in top colleges. It says it also carries 2,715 literature essays. The essays are available through a subscription ranging from $3 for a three days (subscribers are automatically enrolled in the $7-a-month program unless they cancel), up to a one-time charge of $50 a year. GradeSaver has an editing service as well, with charges ranging from $8 a page for proofreading to $150 to edit an essay of a maximum of 1,000 words within 24 hours.

The site offers a forum site where students post opinions (on ”Call of the Wild:” “boring ... zzzzzz!”) and cries for help, (“I NEED HELP**ASAP**ON THE UTOPIAS IN CANDIDE”).

Some sites did not make the grade at all. The guides from PinkMonkey — __ which also incorporates notes from TheBestNotes.com and Barron’s Booknotes — were “the least thoughtful, the least insightful and the most disjointed,” Dr. Fisher said.

BookRags, offered only partial summaries free, and Professor Fisher said what he found there was too elementary. “BookRags is for really desperate people,” he said. “It’s simplistic and it forces people to pay up front.” He found the quality of the writing on Bookwolf offensive. “They overuse the passive voice, then they have a lot of rhetorical questions. It’s banal.”

He advised students to use study guides as additional material to the books. “Nothing can substitute for the original text,” he said.

Professor Fisher also had advice for teachers. “I make my students submit their papers through turnitin.com,” which is a plagiarism search engine. He says it is very effective at forcing students to offer some original writing, if not some original thought.