Open Educational Resources (OER) and Creative Commons

In an effort to reduce costs for students, the UM College of Education and Human Development has created this catalog of open textbooks to be reviewed by faculty members. Read full press release

OpenStax College is a nonprofit organization committed to improving student access to quality learning materials. Our free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of your course.

Free downloadable textbooks from a Danish company. Ad-supported.

Textbooks are free to read online, with inexpensive downloadable and print-on-demand copies.

Textbooks specifically designated for free use. MERLOT also has tutorials, lesson plans, and other educational resources.

thousands of books and reports by the various National Academies in Washington DC. Look for the Read it Online link to the left of the book descriptions.

Full books by faculty at CalTech, in the sciences and mathematics. Most would be suitable for textbooks; some are older editions.

computer and technology related books from the publisher of the "animals" computer programming books.

Multimedia art history textbook

completely open and free textbooks on a wide variety of subjects. There are no qualifications for creating/editing, so quality varies considerably, and many books are incomplete. This link is to the English collection, scroll to the bottom of the page for links to collections in other languages, and further Wikimedia projects.

The goal of the Open Textbook Project is to provide flexible and affordable access to higher education resources in B.C. by making available 40 openly-licensed textbooks.

A new imprint of Utah State University Press, ebooks available on topics related to computers and composition. More on the way.

over 1,000 volumes on Home Economics from 1850-1950. Includes journal articles as well.

computer and technology related books from the publisher of the "animals" computer programming books.

An online library for the Humanities and Social Sciences from all over Europe (multiple languages available).

Over 400 Greco-Roman, Chinese, and Persian classic texts in English translation. An update is in process (2010).

Collected works (mostly books in text, but also some audio recordings) from around the world. Over 750,000 titles in 125 subject collections, searchable by author, title, and keyword.

STM publisher of books and journals in biology, computer science, earth science, engineering, materials science, medicine, and technology

Mostly life and earth sciences, some available as ePub and mobi formats for ereaders.

Books encompassing the history of medicine in American from 1610-1865 (currently), with more to come (up to about 1920).

The collection of a consortium of 12 natural history and botanical libraries, including digitized books and journals. Especially strong in 19th century writings. See BioStor (below) for additional searching options.

Search interface and tools for the Biodiversity Heritage Library (see above) and related resources. Citation searches, EndNote, Zotero, and Mendeley integration, etc.

University of Michigan Press imprint for free digital editions concentrating in new media studies and digital humanities

300 of the earliest surviving volumes of printed music, from the collections of the British Library

DRM free, public domain (federal government) ebooks and reports from NASA on aeronautics, the history of the space program, space science, and more.

Over 250 books from Getty's art backlist.

Read these science fiction selections online or download in a variety of formats from publisher Baen Books. Also read author Eric Flint's musings on open access and online piracy.

MyOpenMath is a free, open source, online course management system for mathematics and other quantitative fields. MyOpenMath's primary emphasis is to facilitate the creation and implementation of online homework and assessment, although it also supports content delivery on a limited basis.

A curated list of open-source math textbooks.

The WAC Clearinghouse is an open-access, educational website supported by more than 150 contributors, institutional sponsors, and the Colorado State University Open Press as well as more than 180 volunteer editors, editorial staff members, reviewers, and editorial board members.

includes the Million Book Project and Project Gutenberg. Searchable by keyword.

One of the oldest and most famous online book collections

Works printed in English, 1477 - 1799.

from the University of California Press. Some are public, others are for the UC community only. A Public Title List is available of only publicly accessible books.

thousands of books and reports by the various National Academies in Washington DC. Look for the Read it Online link to the left of the book descriptions.

full books by faculty at CalTech, in the sciences and mathematics. Most would be suitable for textbooks; some are older editions.

Search U.S. government technical reports issued primarily prior to 1975 and digitized by the TRAIL Working Groups.

Specifically peer-reviewed academic books. (Note: some subjects in the subject browse may not have books.)

"Contains over 130,000 free downloadable documents in six official languages covering all UNESCO fields of competence since 1945 and publications edited by the Organization."

A search engine for openly available digital theses and dissertations from a large number of institutions.