Free Online Textbook List / Free College Textbooks - Mixed Topics

Other Free Online Textbook Lists

It could be said that these folks have created free textbooks lists that put my list on Online Degree Discussion to Shame. They are large sites, with far greater funding and staffing, that share a variety of high school and college textbooks online. Several are global initiatives designed to make learning more affordable for students and the general public through free textbooks.

I've grouped them here because they offer texts in a variety of disciplines. Students may find them a great place to start but while they do generally offer more textbooks than I do, they may not go as deeply into each subject area.

Sadly a number of free textbook sites have gone over to the dark side and now require registration or charge fees to access the books they list. For now, I've decided not to include those sites that charge subscription fees as it seems contradictory to the entire open textbook concept.

If you know of any great sites that I may have missed, please visit my contact page to let me know so that I may share them with everyone else.

 
BookBoon
The Danish company Ventus Publishing ApS is providing free downloadable textbooks in a variety of topics. Their site used to claim that advertising appears on the third page of each book, I'll leave it up to you to check out some of the books but the topics included look like a nice mixture of freshman to graduate level materials. They also claim on their homepage that registration is not required but they do require you answer a few questions, including providing an email address to receive their newsletter. (I won't tell if you won't tell, but the last time I checked, it looks like the email address is not verified before you are allowed to download materials.)

Last Verified: (Sep 4, 2011) Report Broken Listing

 
 
College Open Textbooks
Funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, this site represents a consortium of educators, governmental agencies, non-profits and other educational organizations to promote the concept of open textbooks. The site has extensive lists of top-notch textbooks and course materials grouped by field of study.

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Connexions
Connexions is "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.

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Free Online MIT Course Materials
Considering MIT is one of the major players in open Courseware and online courses, their free textbook offerings were quite slim when I first found this site. The good news is that they have been adding quite a few new things since the first time I visited. While many academic disciplines are represented, the science and mathematics fields are more heavily represented than others.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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