Free Online Resources

The following list of websites represent prominent collections of books in electronic format. Because of the size of the collections in each database, there will be some duplication of titles. However, it is best to search through as many of the links as possible to find the title you might be looking for.

• Alex: Catalogue of Electronic Texts 

  The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a full-text indexed collection of classic American and English literature as well as Western philosophy in the public domain and written or translated into English.
• American Verse project 

  A collaborative project between the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative and the University of Michigan Press. Presently contains 170 volumes of American poetry published prior to 1920.
• ATHENA Authors and Texts 

  Thousands of electronic texts, sorted by author's name!
• Bartleby.com 

  Includes the complete Oxford Shakespeare, the 70 volumes of the Harvard Classics and Shelf of Fiction, multiple reference books and hundreds of other fiction, poetry, and non-fiction books.
• BCcampus 

  BCcampus is the technology and services arm of British Columbia's postsecondary institutions and has been working on producing open textbooks.
• Bibliomania 

  Free online literature and study guides. Bibliomania has more than 2000 free texts, study guides and reference resources.
• Classic Reader 

  Read, search and annotate classic literature.
• Complete Works of William Shakespeare 

  This site has offered Shakespeare's plays and poetry to the Internet community since 1993.
• DailyScript 

  Contains the full-text of many classic and contemporary movie scripts as well as some TV scripts.
• Digital Book Index 

  Intended as a meta-index of major e-book sites. Provides links to more than 148,000 title records from approximately 1,800 commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities, and various private sites. Around 120,000 of these books and documents are available without cost.
• E-books Directory 

  E-Books Directory is a daily growing list of freely downloadable ebooks, documents and lecture notes found all over the internet. You can submit and promote your own ebooks, add comments on already posted books or just browse through the directory below and download anything you need.
• ebooks @ Adelaide 

  The University of Adelaide provides full-text ebooks of classic works of literature, philosophy, and history from a variety of countries, most available free online to anyone because the copyright has expired. Users can browse by subject, title, author or search by keywords.
• eScholarship Editions 

  Over 500 titles from academic presses available for free. Look for "public titles".
• EServer.org 

  The EServer is a digital humanities venture, based at Iowa State U, where hundreds of writers, editors and scholars gather to publish over 35,000 works free of charge.
• Free Computer Books 

  Free Computer, Mathematics, Technical Books and Lecture Notes, etc.
• Free Tech Books 

  Free Online Computer Science and Programming Books, Textbooks, and Lecture Notes
• FreeBooks4Doctors 

  FreeBooks4Doctors was created to promote the free availability of medical books on the Internet

Enter the ISBN of a book below to find related FREE open textbooks.

• Bloomsbury Academic 

  Bloomsbury Academic is an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, publisher of the Harry Potter series. Bloomsbury Academic publishes “world-class research-based books across the humanities and social sciences, with a strong commitment to the traditional virtues of scholarly publishing, including rigorous peer-review.
• bookboon.com 

  Bookboon textbooks are focused and to the point, and address students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Currently their main focus areas are business/economics, engineering/natural sciences and IT.
• California Open Source Textbook Project 

  The California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP) began in 2001 as a collaborative – a public/private undertaking; it was the first organization created to address the high cost, content range, and consistent shortages of K-12 textbooks in California.
• CK12 Flexbooks 

  Customizable, standards-aligned, free digital textbooks for K-12
• College Open Textbooks 

  Funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, College Open Textbooks is a collection of colleges, governmental agencies, education non-profits, and other education-related organizations that are focused on the mission of driving the awareness and advocacy for open textbooks.
• Connecticut Virtual Learning Center 

  The CT Virtual Learning Center offers online supplemental courses to CT high school and home schooled students as a complement as well as an alternative to traditional courses. Curriculum will engage students by connecting real world applications to learning through problem solving and/or project-based learning assignments.
• Connexions 

  Open source educational materials, including textbooks in a repository from Rice University.
• Curriki 

  K-12 Open Curricula Community
• Flat World Knowledge 

  We are the world's largest publisher of free and open college textbooks. With our ever-expanding catalog of top quality books by expert authors, now is your chance to be a hero and help your students save thousands of dollars. Get started today and join the textbook affordability movement.
• Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) 

  The Free High School Science Textbook (FHSST) project is our contribution towards furthering Science Education in South Africa.
• Global Text Project 

  The project will create open content electronic textbooks that will be freely available from a website. Distribution will also be possible via paper, CD, or DVD. Our goal initially is to focus on content development and Web distribution, and we will work with relevant authorities to facilitate dissemination by other means when bandwidth is unavailable or inadequate. The goal is to make textbooks available to the many who cannot afford them.
• Lard Bucket 

  Archive of a small project by Andy Schmitz to archive Creative Commons-licensed copies of all the books which were available online from a specific publisher at the end of 2012.
• Mathematics Textbooks 

  The writing of textbooks and making them freely available on the web is an idea whose time has arrived. Most college mathematics textbooks attempt to be all things to all people and, as a result, are much too big and expensive. This perhaps made some sense when these books were rather expensive to produce and distribute--but this time has passed.
• MERLOT 

  MERLOT's collection has over 900 Open Textbooks. Click on a link to your subject area and you’ll get a hit list of Open Textbooks in different sub-disciplines. MERLOT’s indexing tools enable easy browsing and searching the entire collection of open textbooks.
• OER Commons: Open Educational Resources 

  Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse, without charge. Open Educational Resources are different from other resources a teacher may use in that OER have been given limited or unrestricted licensing rights. That means they have been authored or created by an individual or organization that chooses to retain few, if any, ownership rights.
• Open Course Library 

  A collection of high quality, free-to-use courses that you can download and use for teaching. All content is stored in Google docs making it easy to access, browse and download.
• Open Culture 

  Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video. It’s all free.
• Open Education Resources 

  The primary goal of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources is to identify, create and/or repurpose existing OER as Open Textbooks and make them available for use by community college students and faculty. We are seeking the support of faculty to identify, review, evaluate, and make available high quality, accessible and culturally relevant model Open Textbooks.
• OpenCourseWare Consortium 

  The OpenCourseWareConsortium is a worldwide community of hundreds of universities and associated organizations committed to advancing OpenCourseWareand its impact on global education. We serve as a resource for starting and sustaining OCW projects, as a coordinating body for the movement on a global scale, and as a forum for exchange of ideas and future planning.
• OpenStax 

  Provides professional-quality textbooks that are free online and low-cost in print. Books are peer-reviewed and backed by top-of-the-line supporting materials and are customizable.
• Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) 

  P2PU is a grassroots education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. Leveraging the internet and educational resources freely available online, P2PU provides the social environment for high-quality, low-cost education opportunities.
• University of Minnesota: Open Academics 

  In an effort to reduce costs for students, the University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development has created this catalog of open textbooks to be reviewed by faculty members.
• Wikibooks 

  Wikibooks is a Wikimedia project for collaboratively writing open-content textbooks that anyone, including you, can edit right now by clicking on the edit link that appears near the top of each Wikibooks page.