Open Culture (a wonderful blog that deserves your full attention if you’ve never visited) and led by Dan Colman at Stanford U., has started compiling a collection of free textbooks available on the web. The post mentions to check back often to find new titles. Hopefully, as new titles are added they can be easily found by including an “added on” date or perhaps placed in the collection and on a separate list, with the date added also included.
From the Open Culture Text Book Post:
Free textbooks (aka open textbooks) written by knowledgeable scholars are a relatively new phenomenon. Below, find a meta list of 150 Free Textbooks, and check back often for new additions.
Access the Collection of Free Textbooks
You’ll find links to a MANY other free resource on the site and while IT IS included in one several past ResourceShelf posts, we will once again mention the Online Books Page from John Mark Ockerbloom at the University of Pennsylvania is a wonderful place to find FREE full text books from many different sources and collections. The homepage currently says it contains 40,000 titles but our guess is that it is much larger as the 40K number hasn’t changed in several months as new titles pour in.
We would also suggest that the “New Listings” page is not only a tribute to Ockerbloom’s hard work but a resource that should be looked at often. New titles are added several times a week (most weeks). Amazing! Look at how much was added from a huge number of sources and collections in just last week.
“New Listings” even has its own RSS feed.
Two More Favorites That We’ve Mentioned Many Times: OpenLibrary and WatchKnow
First, the great work that George Oates and the team at the Open Library are doing. They’re building a database of free books and other material (bibliographic data) very powerful but easy to use. One click and you can quickly limit your search to only e-books. If the book is not available for free in the Open Library direct links to WorldCat (find in a library) and several bookstores (new and used) are included. Open Library is an initiative of the Internet Archive.
Examples:
+ Results of a Search for Materials About New York
+ Titles that include Stanford University as a Subject
+ E-Books Only With Libraries as the Subject
Don’t forget that the Open Library has plenty of search syntax available for those who would prefer to use it instead of using “More Search Options.”
Finally, one more freebie that we love not only for the content it aggregates but also for its search. WatchKnow from Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and founder of Citizendium) and many volunteers including librarians.
Here you’ll find free educational videos from a number of sources plus added metadata that helps make the content more easily discovered and retrieved. Even a quick look at the homepage shows how easy it is to search and/or drill down into the growing collection. You’ll also see that using a slider you can narrow by age group. Links to other sources (like TeacherTube) are provided and limit to “school accessible” material that will remove results (just to be safe from YouTube and Google Video). To keep current with new videos as they’re being added we suggest subscribing to this RSS feed.
