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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.
Most of these websites specialize in free textbooks. There are also other websites that offer free audiobooks and free e-books.
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.
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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.
And several business e-books 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.
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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 the textbook you want to use for free, and then choose how you want to get it (online, through the app, or as a PDF).
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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 textbooks missing.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Wikibooks offers a wide variety of over 3,300 free textbooks in subjects from computing and languages to social sciences, engineering, and miscellaneous books.
This free textbook website is run by its visitors, much like Wikipedia. This open-to-all philosophy means that some books are only partially finished. On each subject's page, you'll see which books are completed and which ones still require some work.
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Open Educational Resources (OER) is a digital public library that offers a variety of free textbooks to anyone and everyone. There are over 10 subject areas you can look through, and each subject is divided into three grade levels (primary, secondary, post-secondary).
Choose Textbook from the side of the page to filter out all the other kinds of content you can find here, which includes lectures, guides, games, full courses, and case studies. Each download page provides a link to view the textbook online in your browser.
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The Online Library of Liberty has over 1,700 free textbooks pertaining to the subjects of individual liberty and free markets.
You can browse for the books by title, author, time period, and idea. This website lets you download PDF textbooks, or you can choose the HTML option to read the textbooks online.
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Curriki offers a fantastic array of free textbooks in categories like health, language arts, world languages, technology, and math. There are books for all grade levels including K-12 and college.
This resources also has textbooks for special education and professional development. There's also a lot of other helpful educational content, so be sure to select the Textbook filter option to see only the free books.
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Project Gutenberg offers a wide selection of over 70,000 texts. Many are e-books in the public domain, but there are also free textbooks.
There isn't a page dedicated to just online textbooks, so the best way to find free textbooks on this site is through the search tool. If you're taking a classical literature class, there's a good chance you can find all of the required reading at Project Gutenberg.
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Reddit is a great platform for sharing content, and you can use it to find free textbooks online. It's common for users to share links to free textbooks and websites where free books can be downloaded.
Not all of the links are valid because some older ones have been taken down. If this is the case, you can reply to the thread and ask for an updated link, or start a new topic requesting help finding a book.
Here are some more websites where you can find textbooks for free or cheap:
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