Open textbooks are materials that are freely available, usually through a Creative Commons license, to download, modify, and print in various formats.
Why should faculty adopt an open textbook?
Open textbooks are more affordable than commercially available textbooks and enable student education budgets to stretch further, giving students greater flexibility in their education choices. Faculty can readily customize open textbooks to better meet their local teaching and learning needs. Lastly, open textbooks provide pricing, flexibility and customization advantages that commercially available textbooks currently do not provide.
(from Lansing CC Library)
(from Lansing CC Library)
The Open Textbook movement focuses on the creation and use of books which are openly licensed -- in short, free and editable. These textbooks are also openly licensed with a Creative Commons meaning that dependent on the license, they may be legally displayed/uploaded/hosted, distributed, modified, etc. without fee, permission, or conducting a fair use analysis. (See Creative Commons for more information on the various CC open licenses.)
Many of the collections will have links to the same books, but each collection has items unique to their collection.
Additional books that are not technically "open" are also listed. They may be "free online" but subject to copyright, or they may be low cost options.
