LibGuides: Open Educational Resources (OER): Open Books and Textbooks

This guide provides resources for faculty interested in adopting open educational resources (OER) in their teaching and publishing. Use this page to find free and open textbooks, e-books, theses and dissertations, or online courseware to support research and teaching.

Open educational resources (OER) are resources for teaching, learning, and research that have been released in the public domain or with an open license. These resources include open textbooks, but also course modules and activities, quizzes and exams, and other ancillary materials. Because they are released under an open license, they give educators the right to retain, reuse, remix, revise, and redistribute (the 5Rs) these materials as they see fit.

OER can benefit students by eliminating the burden of expensive textbooks and course materials, which can improve student enrollment, retention, and grades^1,2,3. Students can access OER materials on their first day of class (or even before) and keep them forever, and download them for easy access any time, anywhere.

OER can also benefit faculty by providing more flexibility and choice in course materials. Because OER are freely available online, faculty can assign just the parts they like to their students. And because many OER have permissive licenses, they can be mixed together to create something uniquely customized, revised, or adapted to better suit class content.

Materials released under an open license (often a Creative Commons license) give educators the 5Rs: the right to retain, reuse, remix, revise, and redistribute these materials as they see fit.

Retain
- The right to make, own, and control copies of the content.
- This includes the right to download, duplicate, and store copies of the work.
Reuse
- The right to use the content in a variety of ways.
- This includes the right to use in a classroom, on a website, in a video or lecture slides, etc.
Revise
- The right to adapt, adjust, alter, or modify the content.
- This includes the right to make a translation, adapt examples and exercises in text to fit your course needs, etc.
Remix
- The right to combine the content with other content to make something new.
- This includes the right to make a mashup of different sources into one.
Redistribute
- The right to share copies of the original content or your revised/adapted version.

¹Colvard, N. B., Watson, C. E., & Park, H. (2018). The impact of open educational resources on various student success metrics. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 30(2), 262-276. http://www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/pdf/IJTLHE3386.pdf

²Florida Virtual Campus Office of Distance Learning & Student Services. (2016). 2016 student textbook and course materials survey. http://www.openaccesstextbooks.org/pdf/2016_Florida_Student_Textbook_Survey.pdf

³Florida Virtual Campus Office of Distance Learning & Student Services. (2018). 2018 student textbook and course materials survey. https://dlss.flvc.org/colleges-and-universities/research/textbooks

Open Access Books

For faculty interested in using free or low-cost textbooks for their course instruction.

Open Textbook Library This link opens in a new window One of the most comprehensive collections of open 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.
OER Commons This link opens in a new window A public digital library of over 50,000 open educational resources, which also has tools to create and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum.
OpenStax This link opens in a new window A nonprofit based at Rice University with openly-licensed books for over 25 of the highest-enrolled introductory college courses across the country. Books often come with important free ancillary materials for instructors, such as PowerPoint slides and homework answers.

Use the OASIS search bar to search 117 different sources of OER.

BCcampus OpenEd Over 250 fully-reviewed open textbooks written by faculty in British Columbia for use with the top 40 highest-enrolled classes in the province.
Global Text Project A collection of undergraduate e-textbooks available under a creative commons license in business, computing, education, health, science and social science.
LibreTexts A California-based project supported by the Department of Education Open Textbook Pilot Project. Its "Explore the Libraries" tab features OER in a range of subjects plus workforce materials. Ancillary materials vary by subject but include laboratory experiments, case studies, visualizations and simulations, demonstrations and techniques, and interactive fossils.
MERLOT A program of the California State University system that provides open textbooks, course and learning materials, and other tools across a wide range of disciplines.
Open Education Consortium Open Education Consortium is a free and open digital publication of high quality college and university‐level educational materials. These materials are organized as courses, and often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content.
Open SUNY Textbooks An open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries that publishes high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure.
Open Access Textbooks' repositories of open textbook sites Open Access Textbooks has compiled a listing of websites where one will find free, freely usable textbooks for classroom instruction. The rest of the Open Access Textbooks site includes surveys from faculty and students who have used open textbooks, training information, webinars, and more.

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 Memory This historical collection includes 1,500 nineteenth century American ebooks in several subject areas.
Bartleby The full text of many classic literary works, including Shakespeare.
Bookserver (Internet Archive) A project of the Internet Archive. Access ebooks via the search box. Includes out-of-copyright texts from Project Gutenberg among other collections.
CARRIE This full-text electronic library hosted by the European University Institute in Italy, contains digitised primary documents as well as ebooks in history.
Christian Classics Ethereal Library A digital library of hundreds of Christian books, including 42 Bibles in various languages.
Digital Book Index This index provides links to more than 165,000 ebooks covering a variety of subjects. Over 140,000 of these are free. The index can be searched and browsed.
DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books Contains over 1400 academic peer-reviewed books from 40 publishers, including several university presses.
GAIA A collection of 28 open access books on global, international and area studies.
Global Text Project A collection of undergraduate e-textbooks available under a creative commons license in business, computing, education, health, science and social science.
Google Books Search and preview millions of books from libraries and publishers worldwide using Google Book Search.
HathiTrust HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
InTech A multidisciplinary Open Access publisher of books and journals covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine with over 2000 ebooks available to date.
Internet Public Library 45000+ full text works, fiction and non-fiction plus online reference works. Divided into subject collections for easy browsing but also fully searchable.
Literature Project Collection of full-text books, poems, plays and speeches.
Making of America A digital library for American social history containing approximately 1,600 digitised books from 1850-1877.
ManyBooks.net Classic texts can be downloaded to a range of formats including for a variety of ebook readers. New titles are added regularly and an RSS feed is available for new additions.
MSRI Books A series of Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Publications from Cambridge University Press. The full text of new books is available a few months after publication.
National Academies Press Over 4000 titles from the US National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council are available to download. The free pdfs are available exclusively from the NAP site and remain subject to copyright laws.
OAPEN Library A multidisciplinary Open Access library of 860+ titles from European publishers freely available as PDF files, including titles in several languages. Includes 30 titles from UK publishers under the OAPEN-UK JISC ebooks project.
Open Book Publishers An independent academic publisher in Humanities and Social Sciences. Many of their books are available to read for free online.
Open Library A project of the Internet Archive that provides a catalog of over 20 million books and access to 1.4 million scanned books for digital lending. The search can be limited to ebooks only.
Open Library of Humanities The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is a charitable organisation dedicated to publishing open access scholarship with no author-facing article processing charges (APCs). It is funded by an international consortium of libraries who have joined to make scholarly publishing fairer, more accessible, and rigorously preserved for the digital future.
OpenEdition OpenEdition serves the humanities and social sciences research communities through four publication and information platforms: OpenEdition Books (books series), Revues.org (scientific journals), Hypotheses (research blogs), and Calenda (academic announcements).
Oxford Text Archive The archive holds several thousand electronic texts and linguistics corpora, in a variety of languages. Includes online versions of works by individual authors, standard reference works and a range of language corpora.
Perseus Digital Library A searchable and browsable collection of ebooks. The largest collections are classics and 19th century American studies, but other collections include Arabic, Germanic and Renaissance materials.
Project Gutenberg Offering over 36,000 free e-books for download to your PC, Kindle, Android, iOS or other portable device, Project Gutenberg is the first, and probably the most recognizable, free e-book destination on the Web. They offer ePub, Kindle, HTML and simple text formats in a variety of categories.
University of California Press Almost 2,000 titles from UCP’s Scholarship Editions are available to the public. These include books on art, science, history, music, religion and fiction.