Explore the full list of best free textbook websites to Download Free PDF Textbooks for students, researchers and passionate readers. Compare their features before selecting the best free PDF textbooks downloader websites suitable for you.
We have come to understand how completely reliant on technology we are for all of our requirements as a result of the ongoing global epidemic. People were compelled to rely entirely on technology as nation after nation issued nationwide lockdowns as a result of an increase of Covid-19 cases.
Everything happened on the digital screen in front of us, from grocery shopping to finding a job to continuing our education. There are undoubtedly negative aspects to being so dependent on technology, yet we can still utilize it to our advantage.
Online learning was the most severely impacted, and as a result, numerous e-learning sources rose to the rescue. The best thing about online learning resources is that everyone and everyone can use them.
Since these platforms are available to everyone, including those who are physically limited, the range of learning opportunities for many people has substantially expanded.
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There are several websites that provide free textbooks for education. These PDF books are available for quick download or for completely free online reading. They provide content from the academic, literary, and even children’s literature worlds.
Tips for Downloading Free PDF Textbooks
With the appropriate procedures in mind, finding the ideal website for your needs or downloading a free PDF book becomes simple.
1. PDF Reader
Given that PDF books are densely textual documents, the PDF reader must have a number of characteristics that will improve the reading experience. The PDF format is a better choice than other ones. Editing, navigation, annotation, adding bookmarks, selecting reading mode, and simple sharing are a few essential functions.
With this in mind, one should use PDF viewers for Android smartphones such as Adobe Acrobat Reader, WPS Office, Google PDF Viewer, Foxit MobilePDF, or Moon+Reader.
The finest apps for iOS smartphones are Google Playbooks, PDF Max, etc. Also suitable for Windows are Adobe Reader, Nitro Reader, etc.
2. Requirement(s)
While searching for free PDF novels, it’s crucial to keep your needs in mind.
Some websites have amassed such a large amount of content that it is quicker to type the appropriate combination of words. Others can choose from a variety of books geared toward their interests.
For instance, Free Kids Books contains a library of e-books only for children, whereas Open Textbook Library primarily offers free textbooks specifically for college students. Similar to this, Project Gutenberg has made classic books with lapsed U.S. copyright accessible.
3. Anti-Virus Protection
Despite how reliable or trustworthy a given website may be, it is crucial to safeguard your computer with reliable antivirus software to be doubly sure. Even if a virus does not enter through a website, it may occasionally do so through another medium or a compromised network and infect the user device.
4. Interface
It’s critical to consider how each user will interact with the website’s UI. Simpler user interfaces make searching simple, or occasionally, some people are more comfortable with a certain website design that is simpler for them to use.
When looking for an e-book or browsing the web, we should bear this in mind.
16 Best Free Textbook Websites for All – Download in PDF
1 Open Textbook Library
Best for subject-specific searches for free textbook PDFs.
By offering open textbooks by authorized authors and publishers, the Open Textbook Library seeks to revolutionize higher education and student learning. These are freely adaptable and used. These PDF books are available for free download, editing, and distribution.
The primary audience for the textbooks on this website is college students. It includes PDF versions of college textbooks organized within 12 various academic categories, including Business, Computer Science, Humanities, Law, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences.
Editing and distribution of free college textbooks are also available for free. Free Textbooks by Subjects, Focused on College Learning.
2 Libre Texts
Best for free PDF textbooks from peer-reviewed sources in 12 different subjects.
A non-profit website dedicated to online educational reform is called Libre Texts. It is geared toward college students and has an intuitive interface to make creating and customizing Open Educational Resources easier (OER).
There are currently 398 open access free textbooks on the website, and 223 million students are using them. With the help of its active contributors and volunteer staff, Libre Texts expands. Additionally, interactive visualizations are used to enhance learning.
Large library space and free access to information allow for the creation and distribution of new textbooks.
3 OpenStax.org
Best for college students’ open access textbooks.
At Rice University, there is a non-profit teaching platform called OpenStax. There are a variety of areas, including humanities, math, physics, social sciences, business, biology, etc., that have free college textbooks available.
Since the scope and sequence criteria are uniform across all free textbooks, using them to supplement current courses is made simpler. Although some high school texts are also made available to pupils, college education is the main focus.
Every textbook is free and easily accessible. There are many free college textbooks available online in various forms, as well as free textbooks for high school.
4 Bookboon.com
The best student literature for business, IT, and engineering.
Thousands of free textbooks published by professors at prominent universities across the world are available online at Bookboon.
Any book in the fields of accounting, economics and finance, engineering, marketing and law, natural sciences, strategy and management, etc., can be downloaded for free as a PDF by a website user.
The website also offers brief practical books, such as those on study and career advice, personal growth, and productivity. Bookboon seeks to democratize knowledge by making it simple for everyone to advance themselves through top-notch educational materials.
User-friendly interface, mostly business, engineering, and IT textbooks.
5 Project Gutenberg
It was best for older books on world literature, but it U.S. copyright has expired.
Free textbooks can be found online through Project Gutenberg. A digital archive of cultural works is being created. Its purpose is to support the production and dissemination of literary works.
E-books were created in 1971 by Project Gutenberg’s creator, Michael Hart, making the organization the first to offer them. The website described the protracted process from a notion to an organization.
Project Gutenberg was creating thousands of e-books per day by the 2000s, and the rate has only increased since then.
One of the earliest platforms for PDF textbooks is one that offers older literature.
6 Free-E-Books.net
Best for both literary and scholarly works.
Free-E-Books.net is an online site that offers free PDF textbooks. It has a vast variety of books in all academic fields, including literature. The website’s books are divided into categories in a drop-down menu at the top of the home page.
The website operates a lively blog and arranges frequent video discussions with specialists in academia and literature. Any book is available for free PDF download.
Books on a variety of topics are offered, along with an intuitive platform, frequent blog articles, and educational movies about the literature industry.
7 Internet Archive Books
The largest selection of free books and other publications is best.
The largest collection of free textbooks available online is most likely found at Internet Archive Books. 6 million videos, 14 million audio recordings, and 588 billion webpages worth of Internet content are also included.
Internet Archive is based on the premise that not everyone has access to a quality public library, hence for global accessibility, books and textbooks must be made digitally accessible.
On the website, certain books are available for free download, while others can only be loaned for a short time.
The largest selection of books, movies, and audios are also offered for educational purposes.
8 Manybook.net
Best for language diversity; their books are available in 46 different languages.
Manybooks.net was founded in 2004 with the goal of offering free textbooks online by building a sizable library of PDF textbooks.
There are many classics to browse through because many of the free PDF books that are available here are taken from the Project Gutenberg website. The Kindle, Nook, iPad, and other e-readers provide access to more than 29,000 e-books.
It gives everyone unfettered access and is totally free. The user only needs to click the download button next to the catalog of PDF books for the download to begin and be kept on their device.
Books that are freely accessible to everyone and available in a variety of languages. The customer can peruse appealing graphics.
9 Open Library
Best for a better catalog search experience with Internet Archive Books.
A global collection of free PDF books is available through Open Library. It is dubbed Open Library because it makes all of its contents available for free and open access to everyone and intends to construct a webpage for every book ever published.
The books that are accessible through the Open Library website can be accessed on this website, which is a project of the Internet Archive Books. Anyone with an Open Library account is welcome to contribute to the catalog of free textbooks.
A broad selection of books are available, and the library is expanding and open to the public.
10 Freeditorial
Best free textbook website for PDF textbook download without the need to first register as a user.
Free PDF books are available to download from Freeditorial from all around the world. It serves as both a publishing business and an open library, bringing together authors and readers from all over the world.
Its primary goal is to promote literature while removing barriers caused by cost. Along with offering free PDF publications, Freeditorial also aids with the publication of books written by living authors whose rights it has purchased. The website is accessible in both English and Spanish.
Anyone can upload a book for free and open access, at which point it will be available to everyone.
11 PDFBooksWorld
Best for books with separate editions that are designed for various screen sizes on different devices.
An online resource for free textbooks is PDFBooks World. It aspires to bring illustrious authors from the past who wrote during the pre-digital era to the contemporary reading room.
To obtain free PDF books, however, a membership subscription is necessary.
Free PDF textbook content Online textbooks can only be downloaded after registering.
12 Saylor.org
Best for open online courses for everyone interested in online learning.
A free online portal called Saylor.org offers credential programs.
Free certificate programs, casual learning, and flexible course completion dates.
13 Open Culture
best for material with a cultural or educational focus.
One of the best and largest online venues for e-learning is Open Culture. The content and resources on the website, which was established in 2006, encompass every conceivable knowledge base.
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Free online courses with completion certificates, language study resources, and audiobooks are all examples of free textbooks found here.
14 ScholarWorks
Best for a variety of search techniques to quickly locate free college textbooks.
ScholarWorks, which is managed by Grand Valley State University (GVSU), has a collection of works from GVSU academics. College textbook PDFs can be searched by title, author, citation, keywords, etc.
Only college students are permitted to use PDF textbooks.
A variety of open access, free college textbooks are available.
15 PDF Search Engine
Top for free textbooks in many formats online.
You can use the PDF Search Engine to look for and download free textbooks online. Simply entering their request or a keyword connected to it in the search field is all that is needed from the user.
Its user experience resembles that of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Edge, and other websites. The website is incredibly resourceful and has PDF books for all age ranges.
Open access, several free textbook PDF materials, and a user-friendly design.
16 Free Kids Books
Best for free PDF textbooks for students in grades K–12.
For kids in grades K–12, pre-primary, primary, and secondary education, there is a collection of online learning materials called Free Kids Books.
Free textbooks that may be downloaded in the user-friendly PDF format are available as resources for instructors, parents, and students.
Best Free Textbook Website for Downloading Free PDF Textbooks by Discipline
Bookboon.com
Here is a source for free textbooks in PDF format that mostly cover the fields of management, marketing, engineering, IT, and accounting. Most of the booklets are between 50 and 100 pages long and contain only the facts, and visuals.
How does the firm continue to operate? It offers for sale books with advertisements on them. Half-page advertisements from consulting firms, the World MBA Tour, a manufacturing company, software companies, and universities, for instance, were included in a copy of the 77-page book Managing the Human Resource in the 21st Century. These advertisements appeared to be targeted at the reader of the e-book. According to Bookboon, advertising only makes up 15% of the content, making it quite unobtrusive.
Boundless
This new business uses an intriguing publication approach. It extracts content from publicly accessible websites like Wikipedia or official government Web pages, engages in “human curation and vetting,” then matches the generated material with popular college textbooks before delivering the package in digital textbook format. Only crucial concepts, vocabulary, and examples are present in the entire text. The text can be searched for and highlighted. This student testimonial is on the homepage “At Indiana University, Sarah H. said, “It’s incredibly easy and saved me a ton of money. This website is awesome and prevented my entire biology class from buying a new copy when the one we already had was quite identical.”
Digital books on accounting, algebra, art history, business, chemistry, communications, economics, finance, history of the United States, management, marketing, microbiology, physiology, political science, psychology, sociology, and writing are accessible to registered users.
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For instance, the 14th edition of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: A Global History is available on Amazon for $183.21. An approximately 70-page chapter about ancient Greece can be found in the paperback edition. The so-called “Boundless alternative” is broken down into six main portions and 38 sub-components. Additionally, the literature includes tests and flashcards. The difficulty is that there is no offline option for reading the book; it must be done online.
California Learning Resource Network (CLRN)
There are currently 6,063 open educational resources (OERs) available on CLRN. The “free textbooks” link under “Learning Resources,” where 30 books are mentioned, is what you want to pay attention to if you’re teaching math, physics, history, or social science. The book descriptions specify the target audience for each book in this collection, which covers both K–12 and higher education.
Want some illustrations? A professor at Fullerton College in Southern California named Benjamin Crowell wrote the 1,016-page introductory textbook Light and Matter. A massive 80 Mb of graphics and color photos make up the PDF. On his website, he provides an instructor’s manual for the text. An introductory text on linear algebra that includes exercises covers the material found in “a typical U.S. sophomore college course.”
College Open Textbook Collaborative
This group of 29 educational organizations uses the website to encourage community and two-year colleges to use open textbooks. The textbooks are listed by subject, but just as significant is that the website offers a self-reported list of professors and what they’ve taken from the collection (curiously ordered in alphabetical order by teacher first name) as well as reviews of the books when they are available.
At collegeopentextbooks.org, open textbooks are categorized by subject. Be careful that some of these listings contain more online courses, lessons, and other varying digital resources than they do e-textbooks.
Connexions
Collaborative Statistics, a legendary free digital textbook, is featured on this website. This 726-page, 5.9 Mb volume, written “over several years” by two professors at De Anza College in Cupertino, California, focuses on applications of statistical knowledge rather than theory.
This resource’s usage of “lenses,” or a selection of content, is a cool feature. An “affiliation” lens combines the content that organizations’ members have produced, whereas a “endorsement” lens makes reference to reviewed content. For instance, Rice University’s affiliated material consists of 83 collections.
The “Most Popular of All Time” list, which organizes the content by the number of daily views, is another intriguing feature; most frequently visited, the “Minor Keys and Scales” document, which is 10 pages long etc.
The only flaw in the connexions is that, despite the icon in the search results indicating whether a particular entry is a “knowledge chunk” or a “collection” of modules, some of which are complete textbooks, it does not offer a means to sort on the type of content, such as “textbook.” You might need to spend a lot of time searching through the repository’s 1,340 collections in order to locate everything.
The Global Text Project
Chinese, English, and Spanish are the three languages in which these digital literature can be found, even though not all of the titles are offered in each language. The topics covered include economics, computing, education, health, science, and social science. The books are separated into those that can be accessed via PDF and those that can be accessed via HTML.
OpenStax
This company provides 13 books on these subjects;
- Anatomy and physiology
- Biology
- Chemistry
- Economics, as well as micro- and macro-economics
- Psychology
- Physics
- Pre-calculus
- Sociology
- Statistics
- U.S. history
The instructors who utilize the digital textbooks in class are supposed to personalize them. It is possible to rearrange, change, and add examples to sections. The offerings can be read online via a browser, in PDF and ePub format, or both (which, because each section is given its own page, can call for a bit of tedious clicking). Best of all, OpenStax offers links to additional materials that the instructor may want to use for particular tasks. For use with the biology textbook, for instance, you can obtain a collection of PowerPoint slides (not available to students).
Open Education Group
Six science texts for middle and high schools that are also helpful for community colleges have been collected by a research team at Brigham Young University. The relevant PDF files are accessible and include;
- Biology
- Earth Science
- Physics
- Chemistry
These textbooks aren’t as large as the competition; currently, Biology is 142 pages and 27 Mb. The Utah classes where they are used have come under scholarly criticism because they were initially established as a component of a wider study project on the usage of OER. Results could be stunning once they are made public. Students using open textbooks outscored their colleagues using traditional textbooks, the researchers write. “We’re currently reviewing last year’s outcomes data, but here’s a preview.”
Project Gutenberg
Here’s the jackpot if you’re a humanities professor who likes to employ primary sources in your classes. The “first provider of free e-books,” Project Gutenberg, likely has every classic you could ever need for your kids. The books are available in a variety of formats, including HTML, Kindle, plain text, ePub with or without graphics, and several we’ve never heard of.
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Additionally, don’t overlook the “Similar Books” section at the base of the “Bibrec” page, which offers links to documents that former readers who downloaded your kind of book used. Downloading Joseph Devlin’s How to Speak and Write Correctly from William Strunk’s The Elements of Style will take you directly to The Prince, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and — well, you get the point.
Saylor.org
Saylor offers free online classes, although not in the same way as MOOCs. These are asynchronous; you are not required to log in at a specified time, in contrast to large-scale open online courses. Numerous electronic textbooks made specifically for its lessons are available on its “bookshelf.” Some are only available in PDF format, while others are also available in doc, ePub, HTML, iBooks, and TEX/LaTeX file types.
Saylor is distinctive in that it regularly hosts “open textbook challenges” to entice authors to produce books for its courses. Kenneth Kuttler, a professor at Brigham Young University who teaches using the digital books he provided, won the inaugural competition. He let Saylor know that he wanted his $20,000 challenge prize to go to a group that supports the creation of publicly licensed textbooks.
University of Minnesota Open Academics
This collection intentionally gathers digital textbooks acceptable for post-secondary education from many sources and in a readily accessible way, even though the volumes in it aren’t necessarily produced by U Minnesota. Every book has been written by a professor someplace. Accounting and finance, business and management, economics, general education, humanities, law, math and statistics, natural and physical sciences, and social sciences are among the topics covered.
The 143 current options are comprehensive, openly licensed, and appropriate for adoption outside of the institution where they were created. The option to purchase a print edition of the books is also available for a fee.
Other Sites Worth Noting
Finding digital textbooks produced with iBook Author that might be useful to college educators is difficult thanks to Apple. However, we’d want to see this develop into an iTunes U bibliotecha at some time.
CK-12 Foundation
This OER pioneer offers a straightforward user interface. Go to the home page, select a subject, and pick a “FlexBook” from the available options. The open educational resources available here currently concentrate on offerings for middle and high schools; in the future, who knows, perhaps one of those would meet your current needs.
MERLOT, the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching
2,523 open textbooks are included in this collection of works. Why not list it like the other listings in this article? Since many of the “textbooks” referred to by MERLOT are actually lessons that may be found online, the term “textbook” is used in a flexible sense.
Frequently Asked Questions on Best Free Textbook Websites
1. Is it safe to download free textbook PDF?
Some e-books might contain dangerous software that might infect the computer with viruses, spyware, and malware. Because of this, one should avoid placing blind faith in sources and instead stick with trustworthy websites like those listed below.
Some websites that distribute illegally do so without the author’s or the publisher’s consent.
2. Can you donate e-books to free PDF Textbooks websites?
Sure, there are numerous websites that offer free textbooks and who kindly welcome donations in the form of PDF files and actual books that they may then digitize and add to their collection.
For instance, the parent website of Open Library, Internet Archive Books, welcomes actual book donations.
3. How can self-publish authors make their work available for download on these websites?
On some websites, authors who self-publish have the ability to upload their works.
The website then confirms this and transmits it, making it accessible for download or online reading, just like other publications already available on the site.
4. Can you order a hard copy of a free textbook available on a website?
No. These websites with free PDF textbooks exist just to provide educational materials to anybody and everyone without the need for payment.
5. Do these websites accept monetary donations?
It is challenging to run a freely accessible internet resource repository. Therefore, even the tiniest donations given to these websites that offer free PDF publications are required.
These contributions significantly contribute to website upkeep, team support, and further improvement of website features.
6. Why am I having trouble downloading PDF files to my computer?
There might be a number of causes behind this. Make sure you are connected to a Wi-Fi or cellular data network first by checking your Internet connection.
Check the download folder individually if you cannot locate a file that you are positive you downloaded. It’s possible that the file was kept there without permission.
Ensure that the software needed to view the file in the specified format is installed on your device. To view an epub format file, for instance, you need an EPUB reader.
7. Is it illegal to download free PDF books?
Free PDF book downloads are only prohibited if the website is offering pirated content. There is nothing illegal about gaining access to and sharing online copies of works as long as the copyrights are upheld and the author and publishing house have given their consent.
Statista.com projects that in 2021, income from e-books will be $15,986 million. In April 2020 alone, around 8 million free textbooks were downloaded from Project Gutenberg. The quantity downloaded this year was twice as much.
In a Nutshell
Online learning platforms may actually flourish alongside the reader’s intellect with the correct advice and understanding of where to hunt for free PDF books.
Although most users are not aware of them, these e-learning sites offer a vast diversity of reading and learning resources. Therefore, they mainly just Google the names of PDF books and fall for clickbait.
These websites are reliable, feature the most user-friendly interfaces, and offer free textbooks that have been thoughtfully organized to improve the user’s search experience.
They offer content for users of all ages and interests, ranging from intellectual articles on ScholarWorks to early childhood novels on Free Kids Books.
Hope you like our article on All best free textbook website for free PDF textbooks download, share on social media with friends.
With Internet Archive Books offering the largest collection of cultural works and saylor.org offering free certificate programs, there are books for casual learners, literati, researchers, students and ardent readers.
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