LibGuides: Open Access Databases: Books

e-Books, e-Textbooks, & Audio Books

Big Ten Open Books

The Big Ten Open Books, a collaboration between university presses and libraries of Big Ten Academic Alliance, brings a wide variety of materials in arts, humanities, and social science disciplines that are centered on gender and sexuality themes.

Directory of Open Access Books

The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The directory will be open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.

epubBooks.com

A hand picked collection of the best public domain books to be found in the English language from the last five hundred years. Books may be browsed by subject.

Google Books

Search and preview millions of books and journals digitized from library collections. Titles out of copyright are available in full.

Government eBooks

This catalog contains records for and links to Federal Government digital publications that are formatted specifically to be used with an eBook device or eBook reader software. GPO archives free eBook files found on public Federal Government websites and provides permanent public access to the content.

Hathi Trust Digital Library

Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection.

Intech Open

Provides freely available, accessible dynamic academic content in physical sciences, engineering and technology; life sciences; health sciences; and social sciences and humanities.

International Development Research Centre

IDRC is committed to improving lives and livelihoods by supporting research that addresses critical international development issues. One of the important ways that IDRC and our grantees help to bring about positive change is through our book publishing program, where we share our research results and findings with other researchers, policymakers, and communities globally.

Internet Archive: eBooks and Texts Archive

The Internet Archive offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a collection of 1.3 million modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free archive.org account.

Making of America Books

Making of America (MOA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history primarily from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The book collection currently contains approximately 10,000 books with 19th century imprints.

NCBI Bookshelf

Bookshelf provides free online access to books and documents in life science and healthcare. Search, read, and discover.

NYU Press Open Square

Open Square is NYU Press’s platform for publishing and reading open access books.

OAPEN Library

The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences. OAPEN works with publishers, including university presses, to build a quality controlled collection of Open Access books. Users can download copies of books as PDFs.

Online Books Page

Index to more than a million English-language free books and journals available on the Web. Searchable by author, title and subject. Includes links to Hathi and Google.

Open Access Books on JSTOR

More than 6,000 Open Access ebooks from 85+ publishers, including Brill, Cornell University Press, De Gruyter, and University of California Press, are now available at no cost to libraries or users.

Open Book Publishers

Founded in 2008, OBP is the biggest independent open access academic publisher of monographs in the UK and amongst the leaders in the English-speaking world.

Open Culture Free eBooks

Download 800 free eBooks to your Kindle, iPad/iPhone, computer, smart phone or ereader. Collection includes great works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, including works by Asimov, Jane Austen, Philip K. Dick, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Neil Gaiman, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf & James Joyce.

Open Research Library

Includes all Open Access book content worldwide on one platform for user-friendly discovery, offering a seamless experience navigating more than 20,000 Open Access books.

Perseus Digital Library

Perseus is a digital library offering searchable primary and secondary sources in the following collections: Greek and Roman Materials; Art and Archaeology Artifact Browser; Arabic Materials; Germanic Materials; 19th century American Sources; Renaissance Materials; Richmond Times Dispatch; Humanist and Renaissance Italian Poetry in Latin.

Project Gutenberg: Free eBooks

Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for enjoyment and education.

Project Muse: Open Access Books

Project MUSE offers open access (OA) books and journals from several distinguished university presses and scholarly societies. Through our open access hosting programs, we are able to offer publishers a platform for their OA content which ensures visibility, discoverability, and wide dissemination. These books and journals are freely available to libraries and users around the world.

Standard Ebooks

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of copyright restrictions, and free of cost.

Taylor & Francis Books Open Archive

A collection of 250 Open Access titles from Taylor & Francis Books Open Archive. Browse titles across a variety of subject areas including Business & Management, Economics, Education, Geography, History, Language & Literature, Politics & International Relations, Built Environment and more.

UC Press e-Books Collection, 1982-2004

Includes almost 2,000 books from academic presses on a range of topics including art, science, history, music, religion and fiction. Access to the entire collection of electronic books is open to all University of California faculty, staff, and students, while more than 500 of the titles are available to the public.

British Columbia Campus Open Campus Textbook List
Openly licensed textbooks created or listed by BCCampus, a consortium of post-secondary educational institutions in British Columbia.
Internet Archive: eBooks and Texts Archive
The Internet Archive offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a collection of 1.3 million modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free archive.org account.
OASIS
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 117 different sources and contains 388,707 records. OASIS is being developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library.
OpenStax
Part of Rice University, a collection of high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that may be browsed by subject.
Open SUNY Textbooks
An open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants. This pilot initiative published high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure.
Open Textbook Library
Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization.

LibriVox
Free audiobooks in the public domain to enjoy or contribute to.
Open Culture Free Audio Books
Download hundreds of free audio books, mostly classics, to your MP3 player or computer. You'll find great works of fiction, poetry and non-fiction, by such authors as Twain, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Orwell, Vonnegut, Nietzsche, Austen, Shakespeare, Asimov, HG Wells & more.