OER & Alternative Resources: Open Textbooks

Source: Opensourceway / CC BY-SA

Open textbooks

• are often written by faculty and peer-reviewed like traditional textbooks.
• are free to access, use, link to and possibly download.
• are licensed differently than traditionally copyrighted textbooks. Check individual textbooks to see exact licensing restrictions or requirements.

Browse any of the open textbook collections below:

• BC Campus Open Ed
  Funded by the BC Ministry of Advanced Education, this small collection of text books can be adopted and modified.
• Bookboon.com
  Includes many business topics and a few IT options. There is no peer review or editorial process in place on this site. Instructors will need to review textbooks.
• Directory of OpenAccess Books
  Portal for books hosted in various locations; includes a large selection of international textbooks.
• Flatworld Knowledge
  Flatworld provides faculty customizable books for a relatively low cost to students. Access to the content is primarily through their website. Includes books in Business, Humanities & Social Sciences, Professional Studies, Math and Hard Sciences.
• Google Books
  Some books presented in this mass conglomeration of scanned books are fully available, most are excerpted.
• Hathi-Trust Digital Library
  Digital archive of library materials converted from print. Serves as an index only to items under copyright and makes full text available for items in the public domain.
• MERLOT
  MERLOT is a collection of online resources curated by a community of faculty, staff, and students of higher education. This subset of the MERLOT collection features openly licensed textbooks for use by students and faculty.
• The National Academies Press
  These books are publicly available but not openly licensed. You can link to the content, and even link directly to specific pages.
• Open Book Publishers
  All books are free to read, copy and download as html files and on the pdf reader hosted on-site. In most, but not all, cases OB Publ charges for formatted digital editions (pdf, epub and mobi).
• OpenStax College
  These books were developed following traditional textbook publishing methods, including peer review, editorial support, and creation of ancillary content. These books are available in multiple formats (PDF, print on demand, on the Web) and are licensed to be revised and remixed by faculty who want create a custom solution for a course.
• Project Gutenberg
  The Gutenberg Project serves only books whose copyright has expired or has been released for unlimited non-commercial use.
• University of MN - Open Textbook Catalog
  This site is a portal of links to books housed in various location Although these books are not peer-reviewed in the same manner as other open textbook sites, books must be used by author's institution and by at least one other institution.
• SUNY Open Textbooks
  Open SUNY Textbooks publishes undergraduate and graduate educational texts and readers in a variety of subjects. These textbooks go through a peer-review process supported by SUNY faculty.
• American Institute of Mathematics Open Textbook Initiative
  The Editorial Board maintains a list of Approved Textbooks which have been judged to meet specific criteria.