Open-Access Resources: Books (Mostly)

OASIS is maintained by SUNY. You can use advanced search to find textbooks.

Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)  Maintained by George Mason University, can be searched for more than books.

Directory of Open Access Books

Open Research Library  The goal of this database is to provide access to 20,000 open access books. Must create a free account.

Google Advanced Search allows searching by Usage Rights. To find open access materials use filters, "free to use or share," "free to use or share even commercially," "free to use, share, or modify,"  and "free to use, share, or modify, even commercially."

The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Project  Thousands of free and open audiobooks created by using AI technology.

Many of these books may be found in the major sources of open access books.

DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books Scholarly books which are both "free to read" and "free to share". Excellent source of up-to-date scholarly works in a variety of fields and languages. This collection has now been added to ONESEARCH and the titles should be accessible there.

MIT Press Increasing number of scholarly books as well as journals. Worth exploring.

Open Book Publishers Source of scholarly books. May be downloaded and read for free.

UCL Press The UK's only publisher of open access scholarly books.

Google Books . At present only books out-of-copyright are fully open-access. 

HathiTrust Contains open-access book-length items. A catalog search, limited to Full View Only, brings up not only full-text materials, but also a set of conditions by which you can limit your search (e.g. subject heading, date range, author, language). It also aggregates full-text materials from various sources and displays bibliographical information that may be more useful than Google Books.

International Children's Digital Library Children's books in many languages.

National Academies Press Maintained by the National Academy of Sciences, the website contains reports (some book-length) on science, engineering, medicine and health policy. Not all items are free open-access but much is.

Folger Digital Texts Free digital texts from the Shakespeare Folger Library.

OAPEN: Open Access Publishing in European Networks Scholarly works in a variety of fields. European in origin. Mixture of "free to read" and "free to share".

Project Gutenberg Oldest provider of open-access books on the Internet. Gutenberg may block wireless IP addresses if they encounter too many from the same place. Students may be blocked if multiple students in the same course attempt to access the database. Students should retry by using attempting to access off campus, or with a mobile device, using computers in open access labs or the wired network in dorm rooms. HU Preferred may, however, be blocked.

NetGalley Digital versions of book galleys.

DigitalCultureBooks A joint imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library.

Biodiversity Heritage Library A consortium of 12 natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access. Contains ethnology and ethnographic materials from the Smithsonian Institute.

University of Adelaide Press Ceased publishing open access books in 2018. Back catalog is still available online.

HAU Books Excellent source of modern ethnographic materials as well as some classics perhaps not found elsewhere.

Publishers of Open Access Books Part of the Open Access Directory maintained by the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College. This is a much larger list than the selected publishers noted here. Information may not be up-to-date and all items, especially textbooks, may not be appropriate for university level work.