The Price is Right: 11 Excellent Sites for Free Digital Textbooks
If you're committed to shifting your curriculum to e-textbooks, consider trying free first. Here are the best sites for digital books that won't cost your students a dime.
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 08/14/13
Sure, there are plenty of options when you want students to try out digital textbooks — CourseSmart, CourseLoad, Flat World Knowledge, Chegg, textbooks.com, Apple, Amazon, Google Play, eFollet, and an ever-growing number of other sources. But little in education trumps free. That's one of the findings in a recently released research report from Educause, Internet2, and McGraw-Hill, which examined the value of digital materials in higher ed. "Faculty and students were both clear and consistent in their criteria for adopting digital course material," the report's authors wrote. Little surprise: The most important factor turned out to be cost.
With that in mind, we have hunted down the top sources for digital textbooks — all free. What you and your students do with them on Android devices, iPads, and laptops is up to you.
Bookboon.com
Here's a source for free textbooks in PDF form that focus primarily on accounting, economics, engineering, IT, marketing, and management. The books are modest in size — most run from 50 to 100 pages — and provide "just the facts, ma'am" graphics.
How does the company stay in business? It sells advertising that appears in the books. A copy of 77-page Managing the Human Resource in the 21st century, for example, included half-page ads from consulting firms, the World MBA Tour, a manufacturing company, software companies, and universities — in other words, ads that ostensibly made sense for the intended e-book reader. Bookboon says it limits advertising to 15 percent of the content, and so they're fairly non-intrusive.
Boundless
This startup follows an interesting publishing model. It pulls out material from public sites, such as Wikipedia or government Web sites, performs a "human curation and vetting," aligns the resulting content with big-selling college textbooks, and delivers the package in digital textbook format. The full book includes just key points, terms, and examples. The content can be highlighted and searched. The home page includes this testimonial from student "Sarah H" at Indiana University: "It is so simple and saved me tons of money. This site rocks and helped save my entire biology class from purchasing a new edition when one we had was very similar."
Registered users gain access to digital volumes on accounting, algebra, art history, biology, business, chemistry, communications, economics, finance, United States history, management, marketing, microbiology, physiology, political science, psychology, sociology, and writing.
As an example, Gardner's Art Through the Ages: A Global History, 14th Edition, sells for $183.21 on Amazon. The paperback edition includes a chapter on ancient Greece that runs about 70 pages. The "Boundless alternative," as it's called, includes six main sections with 38 sub-sections. The text also comes with flashcards and quizzes. The challenge is that the book must be read online; there's no offline option.