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- Your school library. There’s a good chance your college library has the textbooks you need – and you can borrow them for free. Many offer both physical and digital versions.
- Open Educational Resources (OER) Many colleges have adopted Open Educational Resources (OER), which include instructor-authored textbooks that professors can use and customize for their own courses.
- Free PDF search engines. PDF search engines like Z Library and Library Genesis (LibGen) are popular among college students, and you can use them to search for your textbooks and download free PDFs.
- Ask your professor. Many professors are sympathetic to student plights and understand that some struggle to afford college textbooks. Some professors even lend desk copies to cash-strapped students – though they probably won’t tell you that upfront.
- Library Genesis. Library Genesis is a file-sharing site that provides academic journal articles, general interest books, images, comics, textbooks, and magazines.
- OpenStax. OpenStax is a nonprofit educational initiative based at Rice University. In OpenStax, you can find textbooks on mathematics, physics, biology, social sciences, humanities, business, etc.
- Open Textbook Library. Open Textbook Library contains many textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed.
- ScholarWorks. ScholarWorks is an open-access repository maintained by the GVSU Libraries that showcases and maintains works by GVSU scholars. You can search the open textbooks you need across all repositories by title, author, citation information, keywords, etc.
People also ask
How do I find free textbooks online?
How do I find a textbook PDF?
How do I download a free PDF textbook?
Where to download PDF books for free?
- Library Genesis. Overall best site to get free college textbooks. This is one of Gradehacker’s favorite sites for college textbooks in a wide variety of subjects.
- Project Gutenberg. Best for English textbooks and novels. This website is a volunteer effort to create and distribute ebooks for free. If you need a text in the public domain, you will find it here for sure, formatted and ready to download at your convenience.
- Mobilism. Best for literature, biology, and make requests. Mobilism is a forum where users can share the media they already own with others. There are many categories, but this website truly shines in the ebook section.
- VK.com. Best for Medicine and Nursing textbooks. VK.com is a Russian social media platform similar to Facebook; however, there is something different about it.
- Overview
- First Stop for Free Books: Google
- Biggest Selection of Textbooks: Bookboon
- Best Mobile App for Free Textbooks: OpenStax
- Links to Free Textbooks: Open Culture
- Search Engine for Textbooks: MERLOT
- Free Books for Free Classes: MIT OpenCourseWare
- Free Textbook Finder: Open Textbook Library
- Easy-to-Browse eBooks: BCcampus OpenEd
- By Students, For Students: Textbook Revolution
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Whether you're studying at a major university, taking online college courses, or just learning on your own, there are tons of ways to find free textbooks online. Some books can be viewed in your browser while other are available for download in PDF format.
Google should be the first place you go to find free textbooks online. Using a search engine like Google will scour the whole web for textbook PDFs. However, instead of a general search, you'll want to take advantage of Google's filetype command. Enter filetype:pdf followed by the name of the book you're looking for, making sure to use quotes around the whole title. For example:
filetype:pdf "history of anthropology"
If you don't have luck with the book's title, try the author (surrounded in quotes) with or without the title. You might also mix up the file extension and use PPT or DOC; you never know what format the textbook might be in.
Google Scholar is another search engine from Google that you should try along with a Google search. It's a great place to find all sorts of academic-oriented content.
Bookboon should definitely be your second method of finding free textbooks online. There are hundreds upon hundreds of books available for download as PDFs, or you can read them directly in your browser. When you're viewing a textbook's download page, you'll see a star rating from other users and similar textbooks you might like.
Some of the categories of free textbooks here include economics and finance, marketing and law, IT and programming, accounting, statistics and mathematics, and engineering. Some business eBooks and the option to block ads are available with a business account. There's a 30-day trial if you want to see what that's like.
OpenStax, a service offered by Rice University, provides access to high-quality textbooks in categories that include humanities, business, essentials, and math. This project was initially kicked off for college students by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. You don't need a user account to access these textbooks, so just pick a subject, find th...
Open Culture, a fascinating repository of some of the best content on the web, has assembled an ongoing database of free texts ranging in subject from biology and management to computer science and physics. All links are to external sites, so while the list itself is sometimes updated with new books, the download pages might be broken and the textb...
You can search for free textbooks on MERLOT by title, ISBN, or author. There are thousands of books to pick from, and they're all completely free. However, what makes MERLOT different from most of these other free textbook websites is that it's more like a textbook search engine: It indexes books from other sites and provides links to them.
To find only the free textbooks here instead of other things like tests, animations, or tutorials, be sure to select Open (Access) Textbook from the filtering menu. Some of the subjects you can filter by include social sciences, workforce deployment, education, business, arts, and science and technology. Within any category of free textbooks, you can copy the RSS feed link and use it in your RSS reader to get alerts when new books are added to MERLOT's site.
MIT has offered OpenCourseWare (OCW) for several years now, and along with these free classes come free college textbooks. Feel free to search for the textbook you're after, or you can browse the online textbooks by department or education level.
Hundreds of peer-reviewed and free textbooks are available at Open Textbook Library. This site is more of a search engine for textbooks since all the links point to other sites, but it's still very useful for finding free textbook PDFs. Some of the subjects include law, medicine, management, linguistics, biology, psychology, applied mathematics, and history.
When you land on the textbook's download page, you're given a table of contents and other details about the book. There's a PDF button you must click to reach the actual download page. There's also sometimes an option for reading the textbook online.
The goal of BCcampus is to "support the post-secondary institutions of British Columbia as they adopt, adapt, and evolve their teaching and learning practices to create a better experience for students." One way they do that is by providing free textbooks.
You'll be happy to learn that there's a remarkable number of subjects you can flip through here, including communication and writing, health and medical, math and stats, language learning, trades, and several others. Some of these free textbooks can be read online, and others are downloadable as EPUB, MOBI, and PDF textbooks. They are also available in editable document formats such as ODT.
Run by students, Textbook Revolution offers tons of free books. You can browse for textbooks by subject or license (such as public domain). There's also a barebones search tool. Some of the free textbook subjects include sociology, world history, chemistry, biology, and ESL. If you can't find the book you want for free, there's also an option to se...
Aug 22, 2023 · So you can get your free pdf textbook with just a few clicks. Starting from personal-development e-books to statistics and mathematics e-books, Bookboon has it all! 3. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg one of the best websites to download free pdf textbooks has a free library of over 60,000 e-books.
Sep 9, 2021 · 460 Free Textbooks – Math, Science, and More [Online PDF for College and High School] While you're in school, you will go through a number of textbooks and the cost can add up pretty quickly. Luckily, there are websites that offer free textbooks for high school and college students. Here is a list of 460 free textbooks, arranged by topic.
Sep 6, 2021 · The good news is that you don’t have to break the bank to acquire knowledge. Here, we'll look at five legitimate websites you can use to legally download free PDF textbooks. 1. OpenStax. OpenStax is a non-profit educational initiative run by Rice University. This website offers high school and college-based material.
