7 Textbook Alternatives

Maybe you’re thinking about switching out your current textbook for a more friendly open textbook. Where should you start?

Good Bets

Each of the websites listed below has a different focus, but they all offer a wide variety of options. They are good places to start if you aren’t sure what to look for.[1][/footnote]

  • The Pressbooks Directory provides an index of public books published by PressbooksEDU networks. It is easy for you to clone, revise, remix, and redistribute any of these webbooks via Pressbooks.
  • The Open Textbook Library is a great resource for finding open textbooks. If you want a textbook and nothing more, this is the place to start.
  • The B.C. Open Textbook Collection collects resources created, reviewed, or adopted by instructors at universities in British Columbia. Materials can be filtered by accessibility as well as by whether they have been adopted by BCcampus courses, include ancillary materials, or have been reviewed by faculty.
  • OpenStax provides peer-reviewed textbooks in math, science, the social sciences, and the humanities.
  • Curated lists of OER, like the Iowa State University Library Guide to OER, can be useful for exploring a selection of open content in your subject area.[2]
  • George Mason OER Metafinder The Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) links to a wide array of open content, including open access books and articles, documents in the public domain, and OER. Because of its large breadth of resources, we recommend that you start your MOM search with only a selection of the “OER-Specific Sites” checked, rather than all the materials it can include.

Subject-Specific Repositories

Some open educational resources are shared through subject-specific repositories. A few notable examples of this type, including open publishers that specialize in one discipline, include the following:

Open Access Publishers and Repositories

Additional Open Textbook Directories

There are several established open textbooks and OER collections available, listed below.

Remember that many of these Open Texts might not be exactly what you are looking for – instead, what might be perfect is taking the relevant chapters/sections from several books and creating a new Pressbook specifically for your needs! Be sure to keep this in mind and explore the next chapter.

  1. some content on this page comes from CUNY Pressbooks Guide by Andrew McKinney; Rachael Nevins; and Elizabeth Arestyl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted ↵
  2. some conent on this page comes from CUNY Pressbooks Guide by Andrew McKinney; Rachael Nevins; and Elizabeth Arestyl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted ↵
  3. University of Idaho Library. (n.d.). OER resources. University of Idaho Library. https://www.lib.uidaho.edu/open/oer_resources.html ↵

License

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Open at the University of Idaho Library Copyright © by Tyler Rodrigues and Marco Seiferle-Valencia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.