Top 20 Places to Find Free Textbooks, Ebooks and Journals
Jonathan M. Gitlin of Ars Technica posted a great article about open-source text books going to battle with the normally sky-high prices of textbooks.
Gatlin’s article got me thinking about where people could find this type of information if they need it, so I’ve compiled a list of the top 20 sites who offer free full books/texts/journals.
Here is a full list of various digital library projects from Wikipedia. The way the world deals with information has undergone rigorous changes, even since I was in college four years ago, but textbook prices haven’t changed much in that time, except grown more expensive. Part if this is in reaction to the increasing number of students who are going online for open-source texts, to places like Project Gutenberg and various others. For more info on open-source access, see the Oak Law Project .
Keep in mind, most of these sites are Western-centric, but there are equivalents for many nations across the board. I’ve checked out each and every one on the list, and from what I can see and what I’ve used, they are all great resources. Please feel free to add to the list in the comments.
Digital Library - By Rodolfo Clix
All the sites listed are comprised mainly of public domain books (pretty much any book published pre-1925 or so) or books with expired copyrights. Each site lays out the specifics so you can read more about their methods.
The fact that people are using Social Media to promote this trend of open access publishing by creating groups, interacting with each other, developing course books for classes together, torrenting them and much more is impressive, but it still remains limited to select groups of students and teachers.
Here are some of the top general digital library resources, please click here for topic-specific open-access sites.
ibiblio - A digital library and archive project, ibiblio hosts a diverse range of publicly available information, including open-source software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies.
Project Gutenberg -The oldest digital library online, PGB offers full texts of public domain books. Project Gutenberg claims over 25,000 items in its collection, with an average of over fifty new e-books being added each week. These are primarily works of literature from the Western cultural tradition. In addition to literature such as novels, poetry, short stories and drama, Project Gutenberg also has cookbooks, reference works and issues of periodicals. The Project Gutenberg collection also has a few non-text items such as audio files and music notation files (affiliates include Project Gutenberg Australia , Project Gutenberg of the Philippines , Project Gutenberg Europe , Project Gutenberg Luxembourg and Project Gutenberg Canada )
The Internet Archive – A nonprofit organization dedicated to maintaining an on-line library and archive of Web and multimedia resources. This archive includes archived copies of pages from the WWW, taken at various points in time, software, movies, books, and audio recordings.
World Digital Library – The World Digital Library is a project of the Library of Congress that makes significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials available for free.
Google Book Search – Google Book Search is a tool developed by Google to help users search full texts of books it scans. While a lot of the books only let you view a limited number of pages due to copyright issues, there are lots more that offer the entire work. Also, even if you just view 95 pages of a book, for example, you may find the information or source you need. Google Book Search allows public-domain works and other out-of-copyright material to be downloaded in PDF format.
PubMed Central, Public Library of Science , and BioMed Central - Compendiums, archives and digital libraries of open-access journals in the biomedical and life science fields.
LibriVox - LibriVox has become one of the most prolific audiobook publishers in the world, producing 60-70 books a month. About 1,800 volunteers have contributed audio recordings to the project. Its catalog includes classics like Pride and Prejudice, Moby-Dick, The Bible, Darwin’s Origin of the Species, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Kant‘s Critique of Pure Reason, Marx‘s Communist Manifesto and many other well-known, and lesser-known works.
The Rare Book Room – This site is a little more obscure than the others, but definitely worth a mention. It offers collections of rare books, including texts like most of the Shakespeare Quartos, a first edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and a first edition of Shakespeare’s Poems, a number of original issues of Poor Richard’s Almanc, Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Redoute’s art, Books of Hours, works by Galileo and Copernicus, including De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium and much, much more.
The Universal Digital Library – This project has digitized over a million books so far. Working with government and research partners in India and China, the project is scanning books in many languages, using OCR to enable full text searching, and providing free-to-read access to the books on the web.
Wikis – Wikibooks and Wikisource are open content textbook collections and free content publications and are part of the Wikipedia Foundation.
The European Library - An Internet service that offers access to the resources of 47 European national libraries, from Belgium, Germany and Helsinki to Croatia, Estonia, France Britain and Cyprus, to name a few. The resources, both digital and non-digital, include books, magazines, journals, audio recordings and other material.
Online Books Page - An index of e-text books available on the Internet. It is edited by John Mark Ockerbloom and is hosted by the library of the University of Pennsylvania. The Online Books Page lists over 30,000 books, and has several features, such as A Celebration of Women Writers and Banned Books Online.
Internet Public Library - A non-profit internet library that includes a KidSpace, TeenSpace, Reading Room and Special Collections. Volunteer librarians and graduate students in library and information science form collections and answer questions. It is a great place to search for answers, find resources for research or ask a question that will be answered by an IPL librarian.
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I like books on LiS philosophy and ontology and epistemology
Great site and article. This list has helped me and my Education site very much.
Great! I’m glad you liked it:)
Thanks for you list!
THANK YOU