Open Educational Resources (OER) and Creative Commons: Books/Textbooks

Free and open textbooks suitable for community college (and lower level undergraduate) courses

In an effort to reduce costs for students, the UM College of Education and Human Development has created this catalog of open textbooks to be reviewed by faculty members. Read full press release

The goal of the Open Textbook Project is to provide flexible and affordable access to higher education resources in B.C. by making available 40 openly-licensed textbooks.

OpenStax College is a nonprofit organization committed to improving student access to quality learning materials. Our free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of your course.

The College Open Textbooks Collaborative, a collection of twenty-nine educational non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges, is focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks to more than 2000 community and other two-year colleges. This includes providing training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that support for authors opening their resources, and other services.

Free downloadable textbooks from a Danish company. Ad-supported.

Textbooks are free to read online, with inexpensive downloadable and print-on-demand copies.

Middle and high school level textbooks in science, math, engineering, and nanoscience.

An additional list of open access (but not open copyright) textbooks.

Open textbooks in open (and therefore easily converted) formats

High school and early college level multimedia textbooks, indexed by topic as well as by book. Instructors can adopt textbooks for specific classes.

Textbooks specifically designated for free use. MERLOT also has tutorials, lesson plans, and other educational resources.

thousands of books and reports by the various National Academies in Washington DC. Look for the Read it Online link to the left of the book descriptions.

Open textbooks assembled by University Press of Florida and the Orange Grove Digital Repository. Textbooks on all subjects, free to read and download, and available for print on demand ordering of hardcopy versions.

Full books by faculty at CalTech, in the sciences and mathematics. Most would be suitable for textbooks; some are older editions.

Downloadable textbooks from India's National Council of Educational Research and Training. Levels 1-12. Most in English.

computer and technology related books from the publisher of the "animals" computer programming books.

Multimedia art history textbook

completely open and free textbooks on a wide variety of subjects. There are no qualifications for creating/editing, so quality varies considerably, and many books are incomplete. This link is to the English collection, scroll to the bottom of the page for links to collections in other languages, and further Wikimedia projects.

Creative Commons licensed, peer-reviewed essay collections written by writing teachers for students.

Read these science fiction selections online or download in a variety of formats from publisher Baen Books. Also read author Eric Flint's musings on open access and online piracy.

A new imprint of Utah State University Press, ebooks available on topics related to computers and composition. More on the way.

Free medical textbooks from a variety of sources, many from medical schools and hospitals

over 1,000 volumes on Home Economics from 1850-1950. Includes journal articles as well.

a collection of children's books published in the U.S. and Great Britain roughly between 1850 and 1950.

computer and technology related books from the publisher of the "animals" computer programming books.

An online library for the Humanities and Social Sciences from all over Europe (multiple languages available).

several books in PDF format from Terra Scientific Publishing in Japan, on environmental and computer modelling topics.

Over 400 Greco-Roman, Chinese, and Persian classic texts in English translation. An update is in process (2010).

Collected works (mostly books in text, but also some audio recordings) from around the world. Over 750,000 titles in 125 subject collections, searchable by author, title, and keyword.

STM publisher of books and journals in biology, computer science, earth science, engineering, materials science, medicine, and technology

Mostly life and earth sciences, some available as ePub and mobi formats for ereaders.

Books encompassing the history of medicine in American from 1610-1865 (currently), with more to come (up to about 1920).

A mix of free and restricted access high quality literary and linguistic resources aimed at higher education use.

The collection of a consortium of 12 natural history and botanical libraries, including digitized books and journals. Especially strong in 19th century writings. See BioStor (below) for additional searching options.

Search interface and tools for the Biodiversity Heritage Library (see above) and related resources. Citation searches, EndNote, Zotero, and Mendeley integration, etc.

A listing of free collections of children's books

University of Michigan Press imprint for free digital editions concentrating in new media studies and digital humanities

300 of the earliest surviving volumes of printed music, from the collections of the British Library

DRM free, public domain (federal government) ebooks and reports from NASA on aeronautics, the history of the space program, space science, and more.

Over 250 books from Getty's art backlist.

lots and lots of books. This site covers most of the large book repositories listed below, including the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, Google Books, and reports and books from the federal government. The newest books.

includes the Million Book Project and Project Gutenberg. Searchable by keyword.

One of the oldest and most famous online book collections

In the Advanced search for Google Books, you can limit to Full View Only for open access books.

(This post describes the books available. To access the books, you must install the iTunes software and access iTunes U from within the software.)

Over 5000 public domain books from the Questia subscription library company. Most of these are Project Gutenberg texts.

Works printed in English, 1477 - 1799.

from the University of California Press. Some are public, others are for the UC community only. A Public Title List is available of only publicly accessible books.

thousands of books and reports by the various National Academies in Washington DC. Look for the Read it Online link to the left of the book descriptions.

full books by faculty at CalTech, in the sciences and mathematics. Most would be suitable for textbooks; some are older editions.

Search U.S. government technical reports issued primarily prior to 1975 and digitized by the TRAIL Working Groups.

in partnership with Indian and Chinese universities

Specifically peer-reviewed academic books. (Note: some subjects in the subject browse may not have books.)

"Contains over 130,000 free downloadable documents in six official languages covering all UNESCO fields of competence since 1945 and publications edited by the Organization."

Free thesis and dissertation search engine with personalization features.

A search engine for openly available digital theses and dissertations from a large number of institutions.