LibGuides: Student Guide to Online Resources: Finding Textbooks

Sites for finding Textbooks

The following resources have been provided by vendors to the academic community due to the COVID-19 crisis. Access is temporary, through the end of May or June, and often requires that you create an individual account for access. It is often best to identify the publisher of your textbook to see how electronic versions are made available. If you need help, feel free to ask via chat or email.

VitalSource
VitalSource Helps is a program designed to support students and instructors who may have lost access to course materials due to a campus moving to distance learning to prevent the spread of COVID-19. This program is made possible by the leading publishers and resellers in US higher education. The program offers free access to tens of thousands of ebooks through May 25, 2020 to students and instructors at impacted 2 and 4-year non-profit institutions in the US.
Cengage Unlimited
Students on US campuses get a free subscription to Cengage Unlimited through the remainder of the term, which gives them access to all Cengage ebooks and platforms. See link for setup instructions.
Oxford University Press
Resources to support students and faculty including online resources, eBook desk copies, online teaching courses through Epigeum, and webinars on teaching online.
University of Michigan Press
Beginning on Friday, March 20, access restrictions will be removed for all 1,150+ titles in the UMP EBC until the end of April 2020. The UMP EBC contains the Press’s scholarly output published since 2012 as well as new books and older titles as they are digitized. Included in the Collection are over 200 titles used in student courses and almost 300 award-winners. Strengths include political science and public (including health) policy, performing arts, classical and medieval studies, American studies, and Area studies (especially East Asian, African, and German studies).
Cambridge University Press (access provided through RedShelf or VitalSource - see links above)
All 700 textbooks published and currently available in HTML format on Cambridge Core are available regardless of whether textbooks were previously purchased. Free access is available until the end of May 2020.

JSTOR
Full-text of hundreds of academic journals in the areas of African American Studies, African Studies, Anthropology, Archaeology, Asian Studies, Classical Studies, Ecology, Economics, Education, Finance, Folklore, Geography, History, History of Science & Technology, Language & Literature, Latin American Studies, Mathematics, Middle East Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Population Studies, Slavic Studies, Sociology, and Statistics.

National Emergency Library
The Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.4 million (and growing) books in its lending library by creating a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners. Users will be able to borrow books without joining a waitlist, ensuring that students will have access to assigned readings and library materials that the Internet Archive has digitized. This suspension will run through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later.

Other Freely Available Resources

The following collections of e-books are always freely available as open access or public domain content:

DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books) - a collection of peer-reviewed open access ebooks.
Open Textbook Library - 700+ open textbooks
Project Gutenberg: first and largest single collection of public domain e-books
Internet Archive - ebooks, texts, video, and images including fiction, children's books, historical texts, and academic titles.
Hathi Trust Digital Library - millions of digitized titles from libraries around the world. Eckerd is not a member but some titles are still freely available.
OpenStax - peer-reviewed, open license textbooks.
Mason OER Metafinder - provides a real-time, simultaneous search of 22 different sources for open educational resources.
Biodiversity Heritage Library - the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives.
Open Book Publishers - freely-available ebooks and e-textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Practical Action Publishing - open access monographs on international development.

The following open educational resources include lesson plans, activities, videos, and slides that may be used and adapted for courses.

Harvard's LabXchange
Merlot
Discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises.
PhET Interactive Simulations
Covering physics, chemistry, math, earth science, and biology.
Center for Open Educational Resources & Language Learning (COERLL)
OER Commons
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 97 different sources and contains 385,629 records.