Open Educational Resources (OER)

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.
Bookboon.com
Bookboon's free online textbooks for students are focused and to the point. They are all written by highly respected professors from top universities in the world and cover topics such as economics, statistics, IT, engineering and natural science.
Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER)
includes more than 500 open textbooks in a variety of subjects.
Flat World Knowledge
This is a college textbook publisher whose books are published under an open license. This allows professors to customize the books they order – edit, add to, mix-up – or use as-is. Students can access the books online for free or can pay for print-on-demand and audiobook versions.
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- University of Minnesota and partners
These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization.
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. Curated by librarians and their institutions and hosted by bepress, the Teaching Commons includes open-access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, lectures, k-12 materials, and more
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.

Health Sciences:

FreeBooks4Doctors
PDF ebooks, journals and links to other free medical books. FreeBooks4Doctors' mission is to promote the free availability of medical books on the Internet. The unrestricted access to scientific knowledge will have a major impact on medical practice.
TeachMeAnatomy
While not a textbook, TeachMeAnatomy is a CC licensed resource for teaching and learning anatomy. From their website: "Containing over 700 vibrant, full-colour images, TeachMeAnatomy is a comprehensive anatomy encyclopedia presented in a visually-appealing, easy-to-read format. Created by a team of doctors and medical students, each topic combines anatomical knowledge with high-yield clinical pearls, seamlessly bridging the gap between scholarly learning and improved patient care."