Open textbooks are freely accessible educational resources that have no, or limited, restrictions on reuse. Many open textbooks use open creative commons licenses that permit content to be modified, adapted, or "remixed" once credit is attributed to the original creator. This allows users to rearrange, add and/or remove sections of the book, and incorporate or blend it with other content. This means you can easily update or tailor the resource to your own teaching requirements as a topic changes or evolves over time.
A small proportion of openly accessible textbooks may have a CC BY-ND ("No Derivatives") license, which does not permit modification or making derivative works, so ensure you check the type of license that has been applied to the specific work you are using.
Open Textbooks sources
OpenStax: Peer-reviewed and high-quality textbooks for college courses
Open Textbook Library: Open textbooks are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Download, edit, and distribute them at no cost.
OpenEd BC campus: Quality open textbooks offered in a variety of digital formats; the first step in adopting open educational resources. Search by subject and download them to your computer.
Open Education North Carolina Textbooks: An NC LIVE initiative that aims to reduce the cost of higher education for North Carolina students by providing free, open textbooks for the most frequently taught courses across NC’s 2- and 4-year colleges and universities.
Open Culture: Open textbooks written by knowledgeable scholars are a relatively new phenomenon.
LibreTexts: The LibreTexts mission is to unite students, faculty, and scholars in a cooperative effort to develop an easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER) to reduce the burdens of unreasonable textbook costs to our students and society.
Milne Open Textbooks: Milne Library Publishing at SUNY Geneseo manages and maintains Milne Open Textbooks, a catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff.
American Institute of Mathematics: The American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) seeks to encourage the adoption of open-source and open-access mathematics textbooks. The AIM Editorial Board has developed evaluation criteria to identify the books that are suitable for use in traditional university courses. The Editorial Board maintains a list of Approved Textbooks that have been judged to meet these criteria.
Teaching Commons: The Teaching Commons brings together high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities. Curated by librarians and their institutions, the Teaching Commons includes open-access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, and more.
Galileo Open Learning Materials: Brings together open educational resources throughout the University System of Georgia, including open textbooks and ancillary materials.
Mason OER Metafinder: the OER Metafinder launches a real-time, simultaneous search across 22 different sources of open educational materials as you hit the Search button.