LibGuides: Open Educational Resources: Finding Open Textbooks

Open textbooks are free, online learning materials with Creative Commons licenses. Many of the collections will have links to the same books, but each will have a particular focus, and items you can't find in other collections.

OER repositories contain more than just open textbooks. All content featured within these pages is free but usage rights vary. Materials in these repositories are released under a Creative Commons license while some are in the public domain.

Open Access Textbook Repositories

Use the search bar below to find OERs in your subject area. OASIS searches content from 79 sources.

This search tool is from George Mason University, their Metafinder searches a wide variety of content including open access books and articles, documents in the public domain, and OER. One piece of advice is to limit your search to "OER-specific sites" to keep your results manageable.

Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)

Open Textbook Network
Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. 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.
LibreTexts
"...the LibreTexts project is a multi-institutional collaborative venture to develop the next generation of open-access texts to improve postsecondary education at all levels of higher learning. The LibreTexts approach is highly collaborative where an Open Access textbook environment is under constant revision by students, faculty, and outside experts to supplant conventional paper-based books..."
OpenStax
"...OpenStax CNX is a dynamic non-profit digital ecosystem serving millions of users per month in the delivery of educational content to improve learning outcomes."
OER Commons
"OER Commons is a dynamic digital library and network. Explore open education resources and join our network of educators dedicated to curriculum improvement."
Saylor Academy
Collection of freely available open textbooks for download, online reading, and sharing.
College Open Textbooks
Focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open and peer-reviewed textbooks to more than 2,000 community colleges.
MERLOT II
Free, peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials maintained by the California State University System.
BC Campus OpenEd
Open textbooks for the 40 highest enrolled first- and second-year subject areas in the British Columbia's public, post-secondary system.
OpenTextbookStore
A free collection of mathematics-related open textbooks. Includes supplements and a link to order print copies of the book.
Textbook Equity
Creator, publisher, distributor, and seller of open textbooks and ancillary materials to college-level students.
Open SUNY Textbooks
Milne Library Publishing at SUNY Geneseo manages and maintains the Open SUNY Textbooks, a catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff.
American Institute of Mathematics
"The American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) seeks to encourage the adoption of open source and open access mathematics textbooks. The AIM Editorial Board has developed evaluation criteria to identify the books that are suitable for use in traditional university courses. The Editorial Board maintains a list of Approved Textbooks which have been judged to meet these criteria."
Open Course Library
Collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments.
Lumen Learning
Supports faculty in identifying and selecting high quality OER, aligning these to learning outcomes, and assembling them to create OER-based courses.
The OrangeGrove
Florida's digital repository for instructional resources.
Open Courseware Consortium
Free and open collection of high-quality learning materials presented in the form of courses.
MIT Open Courseware
Index to open access textbooks
AMSER (Applied Math and Science Education Repository)
Portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in community and technical Colleges.
Open Michigan
A hub that helps people find, use, and create openly licensed content and provides a space to share their educational content. through partnerships with community of schools & colleges, campuses, faculty, students and alumni.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine
"We offer more than 8,500 titles in PDF format. Almost all of these PDFs can be downloaded for free by the chapter or the entire book."
Teaching Commons
Open Educational Resources from Leading Colleges and Universities

Digitized collections, books, journals, etc. from libraries and research institutions. Full-text access and downloading is available for materials published before 1923, including: US federal government documents; works still protected by copyright, but made available to HathiTrust with the permission of the copyright holder. Includes ability to keyword search the entire HathiTrust Digital Library, both public domain and in-copyright titles, to facilitate information discovery.

Internet Archive Education
This library contains downloadable free courses, video lectures, and supplemental materials from universities across the globe.
Internet Archive Scholar
This fulltext search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.
Project Gutenberg
"Project Gutenberg offers over 53,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online."

Digital Public Library of America
"Efforts led by a range of organizations, including the Library of Congress, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive, have successfully built resources that provide books, images, historic records, and audiovisual materials to anyone with Internet access. Many universities, public libraries, and other public-spirited organizations have digitized materials, but these digital collections often exist in silos. The DPLA brings these different viewpoints, experiences, and collections together in a single platform and portal, providing open and coherent access to our society’s digitized cultural heritage."