In recent years, digital textbooks—eBooks designed to serve as course texts—have become very popular in colleges and universities. Most college students choose to rent digital textbooks online instead of purchasing traditional printed versions. Why? Because they’re easier to carry around and usually cost less. If you’re lucky, you might even find free eTextbooks online. Since college is expensive, why not save money and spend it where it’s needed most? However, with so many resources available, it can be hard to know which sites are best for finding free textbook. Today, I’ll share a list of best sites to download books for free.
Best Websites to Download Free Textbooks
This website offers best free cultural & educational media. Besides the free textbooks, you can also find the free online courses, movies, audiobook, eBooks, language lessons, and ect.. |
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The bookboon offers both etextbooks and business eBooks. The textbooks are totally free and cover topics such as economics, statistics, IT, engineering and natural science. |
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If you are major in computer science or related subjects, you may find your textbook at onlineprogrammingbooks which offers books related to programming, computer science, software engineering, web design and so on. |
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Wikibooks offers the open-content textbooks collection that anyone can edit. The subjects cover computing, engineering, humanities, languages, mathematics, miscellaneous, science, social sciences and son on. Now the titles are almost 3000. |
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As a student-run site, Textbook Revolution is dedicated to increasing the use of free educational materials by teachers and professors. Most of the textbooks they offered are in PDF format, and some are eBooks. You may also find the multimedia content on this website. |
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It is been several years since MIT has offered free and open courseware. They claims on the website, “OCW makes the materials used in the teaching of MIT's subjects available on the Web.” So it is possible for the students to find the free textbooks on this website. Fill in the book title to the search bar to see whether your book is available now. |
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If you are major in Mathematics, you should never miss this website. You will find a variety of textbooks on Mathematics here. |
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As a public digital library of open source educational resources, OER COMMONS offers many open textbooks. |
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Beyond providing thousands of vetted, curated textbook or resources, Curriki is a community for teaching or studying. Members from different countries around the world are coming to this platform to share and collaborate to make the best teaching and learning materials universally accessible. |
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You really should try out this website to see if you can find the textbooks you want because this website has more than 56000 titles available for now. All books in this website are free. If you are literature lovers or major in related subject, you will find many old works of literatures. |
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There are more than 29000 FREE eBooks for Kindle, Nook, iPad and other eReaders! Anyway, not all books are free at this website, but they offer huge discounts. You can try to search if your textbook is available at this website. |
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This website offer a collection of scholarly works about individual liberty and free markets. You can find more than 1700titles at this website. |
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As they stated “What you see is what you get”, all eBooks on this site are free to download. What’s more, if you like, you can even upload your own eBook to this website to share with others. |
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The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, as its name indicated, it provides resources, support and opportunities for implementing successful open educational programs. You may try to search the textbook at this website. |
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Based at Rice University, OpenStax offers free textbook for college and AP courses used by hundreds of thousands of students. The textbooks are in subject of Math, science, social science, humanities and so on. |
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I guess most of you are very familiar with this website, so do I. Today, you will find its another function—downloading free textbook. Some users share their textbooks on this community so that everyone who needs this book can download it for free. |
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Open SUNY Textbooks initiative published high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure. The gold of Open SUNY Textbooks is to strengthen the global exchange of knowledge, so all people can access its textbook. |
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Actually, this website provides free ebooks are main published by Sayloer Academy and some are published through Saylor Academy’s Open Textbook Challenge. It’s main business is online courses. All the textbooks are free for users to keep, revise and share. |
Best Websites to Rent Textbooks
If you can’t find the textbook for your class in the first list, you might consider renting or buying it. Often, the best deals on textbooks are online, not at a physical bookstore. Here, I’ve listed websites where you can rent or purchase digital textbooks.
Most students are against buying a textbook because it costs a lot. FlatWorld Unlimited will save your money and get what you need from here. Students can access more than 100 titles for a flat fee. |
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Everand is a reading subscription service offering millions of eBooks, audiobooks, magazines, podcasts, and sheet music. Starting at $11.99/month, it lets you read, listen, and explore however you like—across all your devices and even offline. Of course, you will find textbook in its library and download them for free if you have subscribed from them. If you need to download Everand textbook to your computer, you may find there is no download button. No worries. Try Epubor Everand Downloader which can download and convert your Everand to pdf easily! |
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As the big brother in the eBook market, Amazon also occupies a position in renting and selling textbook. You can always find some pretty good deals at this online store. |
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Chegg is really popular among college student because it can allow you rent the textbook as well as the etextbook at the same time. This site gives you a lots of options when you are selecting the textbook for the next semester. |
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Although Nook share was down a lot in the past year, but I have to admit that it still have its own position in the eBook market. Here you can also rent the etextbooks. You can access these digital textbooks on PCS, Macs, iOS and Android smartphones. If you need to download your Nook textbook to your computer for backup, please just follow the guide How to backup Nook Books. |
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At vitalsource, you can rent or purchase the eTextbooks. It can save you up to 80%. After the eTextbook has been purchased, you are able to read it on line, on your computer or even at your smartphone. It means that you can access to the content anytime and anywhere you like. Also, you can choose the rental period when you check out. |
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With more than 10000 eTextbooks available on this website, it is easily to find the book you want. However, you have to choose the licensing type when you purchase the book, like 90 days, 1 year or perpetual license. Also, all books you download from this website are protected by DRM so you can never back up this book or share with other people. |
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As a division of Cengage Learning, CengageBrain.com offers textbooks, eBooks, digital solutions, online homework and textbook rentals. So if you are looking to saving money, this website will be a good solution to you. |
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The O'Reilly subscription is popular among tech professionals, developers, and students for its extensive library of resources on programming, software development, data science, IT, and business skills. If you want to backup your O'Reilly safari books, please just follow this guide How to Download Safari Books as PDF. |
I hope you've already found the eTextbooks you need for the following semester. If you have any better websites to purchase, rent or download free Textbooks, please share with us in the comments.
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Iris Yan has been a passionate member of Epubor since 2017. Her mission is to enhance your ebook reading experience by sharing insightful tips and tricks. Join her on a journey towards reading excellence today!
