Free College Textbooks
College students who are willing to do some digging might find something almost as valuable as gold on the Internet - free college textbooks. Students are facing textbook prices that are coming to rival their tuition payments.
Today's students are seeing single books cost as much as $200!
I went to school with students who survived by photocopies of friend's textbooks, books shared by a number of students and a few provided copies in the campus library. Since I've graduated, I can only imagine that things have gotten worse.
Finding Free College Textbooks
In our article open CourseWare, we discussed online offerings of full course materials. We briefly mentioned that some of those programs also make available complete textbooks for downloading.
That's right, you can download college textbooks that are being currently used at some of the major colleges and universities for absolutely free!
College Textbooks Written to Be Free
Some educators, rather than continue forcing already over-burdened students with finding the funds to pay for what most concur are outrageous book prices, are taking the open CourseWare, Creative Commons and other opensource information sharing initiatives one step further.
One California Institute of Technology professor, R. Preston McAfee has written an open-source economics textbook entitled Introduction to Economic Analysis that is now being used at several prestigious schools, including Harvard. While the reach of his textbook has not extended as far as he had hoped, it is part of a growing trend in making college more affordable. His book is not the first free college textbook and hopefully it will be joined by many more.
In our research of this article, we were pleasantly surprised at the number of educators who have made copies of their textbooks available for free on their own websites. Do a thorough search for the authors of your assigned textbooks and you might just find the very book you need available online for free.
As the student, who had the dubious honor of having the largest book bill of all the students attending her university one particular semester, I can tell you that any relief would have been welcome and I truly hope open Courseware and opensource college textbooks will become more widely available and make college more affordable to everyone. Until then, students on a budget or who simply refuse to pay the exhorbitant prices for new books will have to scramble for used college textbooks and hope that more and more professors start adding opensource textbooks to their courses.
Free Online Textbooks
These free online textbooks make for great reference materials. Ever assigned a take-home test with rules that included the use of any resource other than a person? Trust me, extra textbooks are the way to ace the test. Even advanced mathematics textbooks might just save your bacon. I lucked into a number of freebies where the sample problem from one text closely or exactly matched the exam question.
So, you might be wondering where to look for these free textbooks. Many of the colleges and universities that offer open Courseware and online degree programs have textbooks written by members of their faculties online and that should always be the first place you look for free materials.
It would appear this trend has been most readily embraced by the science and mathematics community. I suppose it makes sense that the educators who use technology so heavily in their chosen areas of study would be the leaders in providing textbooks and learning materials online. My math and science textbooks were always the most expensive among the courses I took and particularly in the mathematics subjects had very little information that changed from year to year.
While not even close to being a complete list of what's available on the net, here's my humble attempt at creating a useful resource for anyone looking for digital library resources for college and university students.
Historical & Classical Works
Planning on taking a history, English or literature course? Be sure to check out these resources first and you might be able to save thousands of dollars on buying historical or classical works of fiction and non-fiction.
Be clever in your search. If you are taking a course like the "Complete Works of Shakespeare" and the assigned textbook contains his plays and sonnets but not a great deal of additional material, search these resources for those works the course covers and avoid buying a $200 compendium you could build yourself for free.
Project Gutenberg - Looking for Shakespeare, Chaucer, Thomas Paine, or even Sophicles? Project Gutenberg is the site that started it all and the first place I would look for old works (many other sites offering free online books simply copied their materials from Gutenberg). Their focus is written materials that are copyright free; that includes most of the pieces of historical literature (novels, plays, short stories, poems, etc.) that are taught in both high school and college courses. How I would have loved to have been able to download The Scarlet Letter (illustrated or plain text), The Canterbury Tales (in Old English for the pursists among us) or even Beowulf (any one of 9 texts including old English versions) instead of having to scramble to find them in paperback.
Internet Sacred Text Archive - from the site, they are "the largest freely available archive of online books about religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric on the Internet." Some of the works here may be available on Gutenberg and other resources that share books that have gone out of copyright but this site specializes in finding books covering the religions of the world and would appear based upon my quick looksee to have more to offer than the others on this topic.
Google Books - This is a huge resource but it combines books for sale along with books that are offered online for free. The key here is looking among the search results for "Full View". I'm not really a fan of this site as I have found the site to be slow loading and the scrollbars tend to sputter and jump if the entire file has not finished loading. Students with access to high speed Internet connections may not have the same difficulties.
Free College Textbooks - Mixed Topics
Connexions - "a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc." I found a number of complete college-level textbooks by faculty members of community, undergraduate and graduate level degree programs. One of the books I checked is actively being used by faculty at several schools and encourages students to request their professors also consider using the free textbooks made available on this site.
HippoCampus - While this site is geared for high school students, it does offer quite a few 100 level courses and a handful of higher level courses. Here you will find instructional videos based upon common textbooks being used in classrooms where students can directly access the videos associated with each chapter and section of the textbook.
Global Text Project - this site represents one of a number of sites stemming from the Open Educational Resources Consortium. This project is in its early phases but includes a selection of textbooks that are part of GTP and links to others that they hope to include in the future that are currently available elsewhere on the net.
Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources - a growing list of multi-disciplinary textbooks that are considered suitable for use in community college courses. The site admits the textbooks in their list have not been fully vetted. Of the two books I looked at, one was top notch and the other was more of an article than a textbook. Keep in mind this resource is fairly new (April 2008) and will improve with time.
MERLOT - Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, founded by the California State University Center for Distributed Learning (CSU-CDL at www.cdl.edu) provides links to their own and other materials. The educators who back this site review and evaluate many of the materials listed which will assist students in evaluating the quality of the materials. Textbooks, study guides and supplementary texts are included among the materials organized by subject or easily researched through the site's search function.
Freeload Press - if you are willing to register, answer "short" surveys, and see advertising among the texts; this site might be for you. The list of available works looks quite good but you'll have to evaluate them on your own. Sorry, I wasn't willing to register and answer a survey just to write this article.
WikiBooks - brought to you by the same people who created WikiPedia, this site is still in its early stages but does have a growing list of content. From what I've seen the content is still fairly limited, but the warning label on the Surgery section, "Notice!: This Wikibook is by no means intended to be a guide to "at-home" surgery. Surgical illness should only be managed by a professional medical expert(e.g Surgeon)." gave me a chuckle and makes for a good reminder that wikis, by their nature, can be edited by anyone.
questia - There's quite a bit of material here but it is organized by topic. Grade levels are mixed but I did see some items identified as grades 13-16.
Humanitites Related Free Textbooks Online
Many of the collaborative websites listed in the previous section include free online textbook resources in the humanities but the websites in this section related specifically to those areas most colleges and universities group under the generic term "humanity".
Psychology: An Introduction - Free online psychology textbook website by Russ Dewey, Ph.D. This textbook is made available online and used by Mike Nielsen in his own introductory psychology classes.
Introduction to Philosophy - An online textbook written by Philip A. Pecorino, Ph.D. and Professor of Philosophy at Queensborough Community College.
Philosophy of Religion - An online textbook written by Philip A. Pecorino, Ph.D. and Professor of Philosophy at Queensborough Community College.
Ethics - An online textbook written by Stephen O'Sullivan from Suffolk County Community College and Phillip A. Pecorino from Queensborough Community College.
Medical Ethics - Written and edited by Philip A. Pecorino, Ph.D., Queensborough Community College, The City University of New York.
Information Technology, the Internet, Ethics, Society and Human Values - another great online textbook written by Philip Pecorino, Ph.D. from Queensborough Community College.
Perspectives on Death and Dying - when we compiled this list, this book was on its 5th Edition and is another textbook from Philip A. Pecorino, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy at Queensborough Community College.
The Profession of Education: Responsibilities, Ethics and Pedagogic Experimentation - written by Shannon Kincaid, Ph.D. and Philip Pecorino, Ph.D. Don't let the Under Construction signs fool you, everything I saw looked fairly complete.
Math & Science Online Free Textbooks
Math Textbooks Online - An excellent list of college level mathematics textbooks and other opensource materials organized by topic and provided by someone at NYU. Whoever jmg336 is, we thank you for compiling this list of great online resources!
More Free Math Textbooks and Course Materials Online - 72 great textbooks, abstracts and online courses for college math students. The author apologizes for the random content but hopefully through continued use will not discontinue his list. Special thank you to George Cain at the Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Mathematics for providing this resource.
Math Textbooks Online - Group 3 - another page with links to specific online mathematics textbooks.
Free Tech Books - from the site itself, "This site lists free online computer science, engineering and programming books, textbooks and lecture notes, all of which are legally and freely available over the Internet." These books are not stuff that is out of date and from the time of the dinosaurs; it has a number of resources on such hot topics as PHP, Ruby on Rails, and Microsoft .NET.
Textbooks in Mathematics - A great list of links to online mathematics textbooks that are topically grouped and range from general mathematics to advanced topics like number theory and mathematical physics.
Samizdat Press - a number of science and mathematics textbooks provided by the Colorado School of Mines. There are a number of unique offerings here relating to seismology, geophysics and ray and wave theory.
Free Online MIT Course Materials - considering MIT is one of the major players in open Courseware and online courses, their free textbook offerings are slim, but there are a few good science and math resources here.
Physics Textbooks and Papers - Albert Taratola provides this website as a resource for students and others to download lecture notes (he teaches at the University of Paris/La Sorbonne and Sanford) and a number of free downloadable copies his textbooks. He does ask that professionals invest in printed copies of his textbooks available for purchase on Amazon.
Open Source Physics Textbooks - This site shares a collection of free online textbooks written by Ben Crowell, who teaches physics and astronomy at Fullerton College in California and lists himself as "fully equipped with a PhD in physics from Yale." Books offered on a variety of topics requiring differing levels of mathematics knowledge.
A First Course on Linear Algebra - A free online textbook written by Robert A Beezer, Ph.D. in mathematics who has been teaching mathematics at the university level since 1978 and has taught 31 classes (as of May 2008) on just this topic alone. Since he first published an incomplete version of this textbook online in 2004, he has continually improved upon both content and delivery methods.
chem1 virtual textbook - Chemistry 101 Textbook by retired Chemistry professor Stephen Lower from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby Canada. This self-published textbook only exists online and provides a wonderful reference text for General Chemistry and Environmental Chemistry Students.
Soil and Health Library - a broad collection of online books, presented in pdf form or in paper or CD-ROM (for a fee), on the topics of Radical Agriculture, The Restoration and Maintenance of Health, Achieving Personal Sovereignty, and Achieving Spiritual Freedom. A mixture of current releases and items that have fallen into the public domain.
Free Books for Doctors - at the time I visited this site, it was home to over 630 free books on topics ranging from Allergies to Yellow Fever. Most of the books I saw were published post 2000. There are no registration or other limitations to using this site.
Los Alamos National Laboratory Science eBooks - a great list for the serious student of science.
Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library - search the entire collection of 20,000+ digital books. Probably not many "textbooks" here but this site should be bookmarked by every serious science student.
The Future of Online Textbooks
Flat World Knowledge - a free textbook intiative that is in the beta testing phase. Several colleges and universities are using their materials for the Fall 2008 semester. In January 2009, the site claims that they will make those textbooks and others available to the general public. The will also be offering a service to provide the books in printed form for significantly less than it would cost students to print and/or photocopy them on their own.
Theses Repositories
Many of the world's finest colleges and universities are making student theses available online. While none of these can take the place of college textbooks, they are excellent sources for information on a wide variety of topics and even the bibliographies make for a great reference tool.
[Please note: The focus here is on using these sites for reference, not as free paper writing services. If students can find these sites, professors can too.]
Harvard College Thesis Repository - Maybe not a textbook site, but certainly a wealth of high level scholarship can be found here. The site is open for Harvard students to upload their thesis and was started through a student-led initiative in the Spring of 2008. When we checked it only had 24 works but they provide a great reference source.
The Australian Digital Theses Program - a giant repository of master's and phd theses from the major colleges and universities of Australia. Fully searchable and free to everyone. Each thesis listed, links to an abstract page located on the home university's website and includes a link to pdf files of the thesis cover and complete text.
Scholarly Papers
Great resource for finding the most current trends in your chosen field of study.
Cornell University e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology and Statistics - Students can access papers and presentations on these topics that are hot right now and are being talked about by the best and brightest researchers in the world.
The Digital Library of the Commons - from the site, "This site contains an author-submission portal; an archive of full-text articles, papers, and dissertations; the Comprehensive Bibliography of the Commons; a Keyword Thesaurus, and links to relevant reference sources on the study of the commons." This site is fully searchable and covers a wide variety of topics.
Cogprints from the site, "an electronic archive for self-archive papers in any area of Psychology, neuroscience, and Linguistics, and many areas of Computer Science (e.g., artificial intelligence, robotics, vison, learning, speech, neural networks), Philosophy (e.g., mind, language, knowledge, science, logic), Biology (e.g., ethology, behavioral ecology, sociobiology, behaviour genetics, evolutionary theory), Medicine (e.g., Psychiatry, Neurology, human genetics, Imaging), Anthropology (e.g., primatology, cognitive ethnology, archeology, paleontology), as well as any other portions of the physical, social and mathematical sciences that are pertinent to the study of cognition." I found a number of excellent pre-publish books, research papers and other scholarly information here and would definitely include it in my bookmarks if I were a student in any of the included areas.
Fun Free Online Books Resource
Free Science Fiction Books Online - maybe not something that many would use as part of their college curriculum, but this site is an independent publisher's site that offers older books for free downloading and a subscription service that provides 5-7 newly released books per month. Anyone who supports our troops deserves our support and the great folks at Baen Publishing have given the soldiers and sailers serving aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise tens of thousands of brand new books and CDs since 2003.