Educational Technology
  and Library Services

Open Educational Resources

The following list of e-textbook and e-book resources was compiled by Barbara B. Romersheuser, District Library Media Coordinator for Eagle County Schools.

• The Assayer - The web's largest catalog of books whose authors have made them available for free. Users can also submit reviews. The site has been around since 2000, and is a particularly good place to find free books about math, science, and computers. Free.
   
  
• Baen Free Library - More than 75 relatively new science fiction books in Reader, Palm, Rocker, and RTF. Free.
   
  
• Bedford Freeman Worth Publishing
   
  
• Beyond Textbooks - Vail, Arizona project.
   
  
• Books On Board - Independent e-bookstore.
   
  
• California Learning Resources Network (CLRN) - Central site for the California Department of Education Digital Textbook Initiative. Free.
   
  
• CK-12 Foundation - Has created a tool for producing and distributing textbooks online and is at the forefront of an “open source” movement to issue K-12 textbooks for free. Currently this nonprofit organization has more than a dozen titles, including six available through California’s new Digital Textbook Initiative. The Flexbook Model - Free.
   
  
• Classic Book Library - More than 125 books in seven genres featured in an HTML page-by-page format. Free.
   
  
• Commonwealth of Learning Finder - Designed for open and distance-learning practitioners. It searches the majority of well-regarded sources of information in open and distance learning in a variety of subject areas and levels. Free.
   
  
• Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources - Provides large number of links to OER sites. Not necessarily aligned to community college but other arenas. Free.
   
  
• Connexions - A project at Rice University supported by the Hewlett Foundation to promote collaborative development, free sharing, and rapid publishing of scholarly content on the Web. Content is organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons "attribution" license. Free.
   
  
• CourseSmart - A five-year old joint venture of five major textbook publishers sells electronic subscriptions to almost 7,000 textbooks, mainly to college students and at up to half the cost of paper editions. Some high schools have already tapped that collection for upper level and AP courses. [Publishers include: Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Wiley]
   
  
• Curriki - Open source digital K-12 curriculum related materials. Curriki Advanced Search: Search Curriki’s vast education resource repository. Advanced search allows you to specify subject, topic, grade level, media type and more! Free.
   
  
• Digital Textbooks - Online etextbook & ebookstore owned and operated by MBS Textbook Exchange and MBS Direct, both located in Columbia, Missouri.
   
  
• DiscoverEd - A Creative Commons search engine devoted to open-license educational resources on the web. Use the site just as you would a typical search engine! Free.
   
  
• E-Books Directory - A daily growing list of freely downloadable ebooks, documents and lecture notes found all over the internet. You can submit and promote your own ebooks, add comments on already posted books or just browse through the directory below and download anything you need.
   
  
• Electronic Text Center - The University of Virginia Library offers thousands of xml, HTML, Reader, and Palm texts. (add /ebooks to end of above URL for ebooks that are also available.)
   
  
• Federal Resources for Educational Excellence - Allows you to search learning resources from government agencies. Find animations, primary documents, photos, videos and more! Licenses tend to be either All Rights Reserved or public domain. Free.
   
  
• Flatworld Knowledge - Open source digital K-12 curriculum. Free.
   
  
• Florida Virtual School - Long a provider of online, distance learning, has just released the Conspiracy Code game, an online program that has students play lead characters exploring an interactive, 3D environment that ranges from the Revolutionary War to the war on terror. FLVS teachers serve as facilitators and assess the work of students, who-upon completing the extensive program-receive full credit for high school American history. Florida residents take courses for free while non-Florida residents take courses based on tuition rates.
   
  
• Free Curricula Center - The Center helps its participants work together to create textbooks, instructor guides, and other materials for the subjects in which they have expertise. We do this by providing online tools to help educators collaborate successfully and by proving a space on the Internet where students can have free, easy access to their finished products. We also serve as a link to the resources of others, and mirror their material when permitted. Free.
   
  
• Google Books - or Google University Learning - searches a collection of OER and OCW sites.
   
  
• iChapters - Cengage Learning – fee based.
   
  
• The Internet Public Library - Wide variety of Web 2.0 resources. Free.
   
  
• K-12 Open Source - K12OpenSource.com is a collaborative effort to organize and bring the benefits of Open Source Software and training to K-12 educational organizations--that is, to help build a more organized Free and Open Source Software "ecosystem" for K-12. This is “thin-client” Linux - based software. Potential model for reducing district overhead costs by using free open source software instead of Microsoft based/similar software. Free.
   
  
• Learning Objects - Can be used for quick instruction and/or incorporation into an online education curriculum. This collects links to OERs, but does not actually store any itself. Over 250 links, with updates on OCW and wiki sites. Free.
   
  
• Making of America (MOA) - Created by Cornell University Library, MOA is a digital library of primary sources in American social history (antebellum through Reconstruction periods). This is a full text/image journal site of 22 magazines from 1830s to 1900s.
   
  
• Manybooks.net - More than 600 titles in a variety of formats: Palm, Rocker, PDF, and iPod. Free.
   
  
• McGraw-Hill Education’s CINCH Math - A new K6 all-digital math curriculum in textbook format that maximizes whiteboard technology and student response devices to support teachers the way they want to teach and students the way they want to learn. Subscription-based, lessons in CINCH Mathematics can be customized to meet state standards or district requirements. Teachers also can customize lessons based on individual and classroom needs. Fee based.
   
  
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT. No registration required. Includes excellent free videos to supplement classroom instruction and/or differentiate learning. Free.
   
  
• Merlot - For faculty & students of higher education. Free.
   
  
• National Instructional Materials Access Center (NIMAC) - A national electronic file repository that makes National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS) files available for the production of core print instructional materials in specialized formats. Created under IDEA 2004, the NIMAC receives source files in NIMAS format from textbook publishers, and makes these files available for download to Authorized Users in the United States and its territories through an online database. Free – excellent resource for SPED.
   
  
• OdysseyWare - Has developed more than 50 online courses for grades 3-12 that cover the major subject areas. They are used at over 1,200 schools across the country. While focusing on the individual needs of at-risk students, a growing number of districts have begun using OdysseyWare courses for the general school population. Fee based.
   
  
• OERCommons - Network for OER content resources – solid search engine for all of these types of resources. This large database of OER includes resources for K-12 and higher education. It also includes features such as tagging, ratings, comments, reviews, and social networking. Search by subject area and grade level, or browse recommended resources. Free.
   
  
• OER Dynamic Search Engine - Directs your search to content from a host of top OER repositories. Free.
   
  
• Open Courseware Finder - Collects a list of courses from some of the well-known open courseware sites, and organizes them into categories. It has a quick-loading user interface, and is great for finding STEM content. Free.
   
  
• OpenLearn - British based, but excellent resource to support instruction and learning includes LearningSpace (content) & LabSpace (collaboration). Free.
   
  
• Open Library - Open Library is an open project: the software is open, the data is open, the documentation is open, and we welcome your contribution. Free.
   
  
• Page-by-Books - Offers approximately 400 books to be read online (in HTML format). Free.
   
  
• Primas - McGraw-Hill only - fee based.
   
  
• Project Gutenberg - Project Gutenberg has 20,000 free books in its Online Book Catalog and is the oldest producer of free ebooks on the Internet. The mission of Project Gutenberg is to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. In an effort to promote intercultural understanding, the World Digital Library plans to make available significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, archi­tectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. Free.
   
  
• Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic (RFB&D) - Accessible audiobook library for students with disabilities such as visual impairment or dyslexia. Excellent resource for SPED, fee based.
   
  
• Temoa - A public, multilingual hub that allows the user to discover OERs by subject area or media type. The site features faceted searching and social networking tools help academics, teachers and students. Free.
   
  
• Textbook Revolution - A student-run site dedicated to increasing the use of free educational materials by teachers and professors. The approach is to bring all of the free textbooks together in one place, review them, and let the best rise to the top and find their way into the hands of students in classrooms around the world. Free.
   
  
• Textbooks Free - Indexes a variety of freely accessible materials.
   
  
• USGS Books and Other Publications - Listings of online books, reports, and pamphlets published by the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geology Discipline. Free.
   
  
• VitalSource Bookshelf - Customizable online e-textbook and e-bookstore. Fee based.
   
  
• Wiley Plus - Wiley Publishing only, fee based.
   
  
• Wikibooks - A project started in 2003 with the mission to create a free collection of open-content textbooks that anyone can edit. Free.
   
  
• Wired for Books - From Ohio University, collections of audio books and interviews (in a variety of formats). Free.
   
  
• Zino Digital Textbooks - McGraw-Hill only (higher ed)