Open Access Books & Textbooks
o Alex
A full-text indexed collection of classic American and English literature, and Western philosophy, written or translated into English.
o Australian Dictionary of Biography
The Australian Dictionary of Biography is Australia's pre-eminent dictionary of national biography. In it, you will find concise, informative, and fascinating descriptions of the lives of significant and representative persons in Australian history. The Australian National University National Centre of Biography produces it.
Bible Gateway hosts more than 200 versions of the Bible in over 70 languages that can freely be read, researched, and referenced anywhere. Includes a library of audio Bibles, mobile apps, devotionals, email newsletters, and other free resources.
Digital Book Index links to over 165,000 full-text digital books from commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities, and private sites. More than 140,000 of these books, texts, and documents are available for free.
o Directory of Open Access Books
DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open-access books and helps users find trusted open-access book publishers. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.
A growing list of freely downloadable ebooks, documents, and lecture notes. It is possible to search, browse by subject, and see recently added or most popular titles.
From Amedeo, the free medical literature guide promotes free access to medical books.
Medical Science is the science of dealing with the maintenance of health, and the prevention and treatment of disease. This site contains many topics on medicine and each subtopic contains many free medical books and resources; these are highly beneficial for doctors and students. Some of the resources in this section can be viewed online and some can be downloaded.
o GAIA (University of California)
Global, Area and International Archive (GAIA) aims to represent the best traditions of regional studies, reconfigured through fresh global, transnational, and thematic perspectives. GAIA volumes are published in both open-access digital and print editions.
o Gallica
This site from the Bibliotheque Nationale de France allows access to thousands of digitized books, mostly in French.
HathiTrust was founded in 2008 as a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries now preserving 18+ million digitized items in the HathiTrust Digital Library. We offer reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. and international copyright law, text, and data mining tools for the entire corpus, and other emerging services based on the combined collection.
o HINARI
For those conducting research in the health sciences, some free collections are available via HINARI.
o InTech
A multidisciplinary Open Access publisher of books and journals covering the fields of Science, Technology, and Medicine with over 7,100 ebooks available to date.
Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
JustFreeBooks searches the content of more than 700 websites, including gutenberg.org, wikibooks.org, and archive.org. With JustFreeBooks, you can find all sorts of free ebooks for your phone or tablet: public domain texts, open books, free audiobooks, and more.
The National Academies Press (NAP) publishes the publications of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. NAP publishes more than 200 publications a year on a wide range of science, engineering, and medicine topics.
o NCBI Bookshelf
The National Center for Biotechnology Information’s Bookshelf site provides free access to books and documents in life science and healthcare.
o OAPEN
OAPEN promotes and supports the transition to open access for academic books by providing open infrastructure services to stakeholders in scholarly communication. They work with publishers to build a quality-controlled collection of open-access books in the Humanities and Social Sciences areas.
This page lists freely accessible archives of books. Their local index includes more than 3 million works in various formats.
o Open Access Theses & Dissertations
A computer science textbook and series on electricity and electronics are available, as well as tutorials and courses.
Over 700 English language books on multiple topics.
Open textbooks have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from various colleges and universities to assess their quality.
PDF Drive is a search engine for PDF files. They have more than 75,000,000 ebooks for you to download for free.
Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free ebooks. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (PGLAF) is a non-profit corporation that oversees the operation of Project Gutenberg. Day-to-day operation of the Project Gutenberg website, support, and content is by volunteers.
A 'treasure trove of free Australian literature' with more than 5,000 titles in the public domain to choose from.
The open-access ebook is freely available online. In addition to this free electronic version, a print edition is offered for those who still wish to buy a printed book.
o UCL Press (University College London)
Established as the UK’s first fully open-access university press in 2015, UCL Press has fast become one of the leading open-access scholarly publishers in the UK. They publish a wide range of open-access scholarly monographs and edited collections, student textbooks, and academic journals available to read and download free of charge.
o University of California Press ebooks Collection, 1982-2004
UC Press ebooks Collection, 1982-2004, includes almost 2,000 books from academic presses on art, science, history, music, religion, and fiction topics. Nearly 700 titles are available to the public; the rest are for University of California faculty, staff, and students.