The Open Education movement has many merits in terms of providing free resources to students and instructors from K-12 to post-secondary and graduate education -“open” in terms of no commercialization or publisher/company involvement. Open also means that it has been made available under the Creative Commons licensing in terms of sharing, repurposing, and using. This is a list of open (free) textbooks for use at the college and university level. Using open textbooks saves students much money (up to $1300 a year or more) and provides them and instructors with learning materials that they can share, mark up, easily distribute and access free of charge. Here is a list (as of October 2012) of the best sites to find digital and free textbooks to use.

Flatworld Knowledge: http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/

• Claims to be first and largest publisher of open and free textbooks
• Former publisher staff have built company on investments to offer cheap print and free digital versions of high quality textbook titles
• Catalog as of October 2012 has over 100+ titles – http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/

 

OER Commons: http://www.oercommons.org/

• Funded by ISKME: An independent non-profit institute dedicated to helping educators through sharing information since 2007
• Textbook collection has over 882 elements http://www.oercommons.org/courses/material_types/textbooks

 

MERLOT: http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm

• MERLOT = Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching
• Peer reviewed open and online resources for faculty, staff and students of higher education
• Textbook collection (2220 items) at http://www.merlot.org/merlot/materials.htm?materialType=Open%20Textbook

 

Connexions: http://cnx.org/

• Part of Rice University, Connexions is a repository of free learning materials
• Content is modularized and isn’t always a textbook per se, but covers many topics

 

Wikibooks:  http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

• open books for an open world is their tag line
• Open textbooks, manuals, annotated texts and guides
• Nearly 2500 books available freely for editing

 

OpenStax: http://openstaxcollege.org/books

• Just getting going in late 2012, there are a few published books of high quality
• Check back frequently for updated books added to collection

 

BookBoon –http://bookboon.com/

• not 100% open source (as they use advertising within downloaded book to support) but many free texts to download
• Textbook area: http://bookboon.com/en/textbooks

 

Free Book Centre: http://www.freebookcentre.net/

• a collection of links to free books in medical, physics, computer science, mathematics and electronics

 

Global Text Project – http://globaltext.terry.uga.edu/

• Funded by the Jacobs Foundation, the open text project aims to publish open and free textbooks
• Textbook titles in PDF and HMTL formats: http://globaltext.terry.uga.edu/books

 

CK-12: http://www.ck12.org/

• Although K-12 focused, there are many good books here that might assist students with concepts in first year, Adult Basic Education, International High School or Faculties of Education and International Education
• High quality site, with modularized resources and larger texts

 

SAYLOR.ORG: http://www.saylor.org/

• Non-profit organization funded by Michael Saylor
• Provides over 200 free self-paced courses with learning materials and text readings within
• Focus on undergraduate university/college level
• All courses are open  to all

 

Free Technology Academy: http://ftacademy.org/

• Founded by two European universities, houses a free online master technology programme about free technologies, has modules about free technologies
• Modules/Texts: http://ftacademy.org/materials