Research Guides: Open Educational Resources (OER): Open Textbooks

What are open textbooks?

An emerging development in OER is open textbooks, which are textbooks that are freely available with nonrestrictive licenses. Covering a wide range of disciplines, open textbooks are available to download and print in various file formats from several web sites and OER repositories. Open textbooks can range from public domain books to existing textbooks to textbooks created specifically for OER. Open textbooks help solve the problems of the high cost of textbooks, book shortages, and access to textbooks as well as providing the capacity to better meet local teaching and learning needs.

-- Openstax CNX

Open Textbook Sources

BC Campus Open Textbooks
BC Campus Open Textbooks offers over 150 textbooks across disciplines that are all openly licensed with Creative Commons licenses. They also offer a guide to authoring and adapting open textbooks.
Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER)
includes more than 500 open textbooks in a variety of subjects.
Galileo
The repository is administrated by Affordable Learning Georgia, an initiative of GALILEO and the University System of Georgia which aims to reduce the cost of textbooks to students and contribute to their retention, progression, and graduation.
InTech Open Access Textbooks
InTechOpen is the world's largest Science, Technology and Medincine Open Access book publisher. With a goal to provide free online access to research since 2004, InTechOpen has published 2,773 books and 45,530 scientific works by 96,019 international scientists.
National Academies Press
Most books published by the National Academies Press can be downloaded for free in PDF format. Just find the book you want, bypass the print price, and click the “Download Free PDF” button. This site requires that you provide a name and e-mail address.
OER Commons
Materials range from pre-k to secondary. Along with other materials, textbooks are included.
Open Culture
has a collection of 150 free textbooks from Art History to Physics and Business.
Open Learning Initiative - Carnegie Mellon University
You can access most OLI course materials at no cost to you and work at your own pace*. Our learning platform gives you targeted feedback as you go, which helps you know if you are mastering a topic or if you need more practice.
OpenStax
OpenStax offers students free textbooks that meet scope and sequence requirements for most courses. These are peer-reviewed texts written by professional content developers
Open Textbook Library
Open textbooks are real, complete textbooks licensed so teachers and students can freely use, adapt, and distribute the material. Open textbooks can be downloaded for no cost, or printed inexpensively.

This library is a tool to help instructors find affordable, quality textbook solutions. All textbooks in this library are complete and openly licensed.
Project Gutenberg
is the place where you can download 33,000 free books! This is a great resource for Literature classes and books for young children.
SpringerOpen
Fully open access books. Authors in all disciplines now have the opportunity to publish open access books, including complete monographs, edited volumes, proceedings and SpringerBriefs.
Milne Open Textbooks
Milne Library Publishing at SUNY Geneseo manages and maintains Milne Open Textbooks, a catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff.
Teaching Commons
The Teaching Commons showcases high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities and makes them available to educators and students around the world.
Textbook Revolution
Textbook Revolution is a student-run site dedicated to increasing the use of free educational materials by teachers and professors.. On this site you'll find links and reviews of textbooks and select educational resources. Some of the books are PDF files, others are viewable online as e-books, or some are simply web sites containing course or multimedia content.
Wikibooks
is a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational books that anyone can edit. Rather than be subject to expensive static books, Wikibooks readily encourages copying, modifying, reusing, and free distribution of its books.
Writing Commons
CC-BY-NC-ND

Discipline/Subject Specific Textbooks

Humanities:

Smarthistory
Smarthistory.org is a free, not-for-profit, multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook.

STEM:

Free TechBooks
Lists computer science and programming books which are made freely & legally available on the Internet.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

Ask a Librarian

Make a Tutoring Appointment

What are open textbooks?

What are open textbooks?

Open Textbook Sources

Discipline/Subject Specific Textbooks

TCC Chesapeake

TCC Norfolk

TCC Portsmouth

TCC Virginia Beach