As students, textbooks are a necessary (evil) expense. If you know where to look, however, you can find much of what you need online.
Here’s a short list of sites that offer FREE textbooks online.
Textbook Revolution:
http://www.textbookrevolution.org/index.php/Book:Lists/Subjects
Textbook Revolution is a student-run site dedicated to increasing the use of free educational materials by teachers and professors. Here, you'll find links and reviews of textbooks and select educational resources. Some of the books are PDF files, others are viewable online as e-books, or some are simply web sites containing course or multimedia content.
Bookboon
http://bookboon.com/int/student
With topics spanning almost every imaginable topic, Bookboon provides online textbooks for students in PDF format. What’s cool about this site, is that these free ebooks can be downloaded without registration, as they are financed by advertising within each ebook.
Flat World Knowledge
http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/catalog
Each book is subject to rigorous standards – written by expert authors, peer-reviewed, professionally edited and developed – before it is uploaded to the net. Students have a choice of paying to receive the textbook from a variety of mediums, or reading the textbook online for free.
WikiBooks:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Books_by_subject
A crowdsourced effort much like Wikipedia, WikiBooks users are able to contribute to topics they are familiar with, and have other users vet and verify their posts. Although it’s still a work in progress, Wikibooks is a valuable resource for learners worldwide.
Check this page out for a great list of sites where novels, textbooks and study guides are readily available for download. Books by famous authors, Shakespearean plays, books in foreign languages… Chances are you’ll find at least one useful resource in this list of over a hundred awesome links. Stress busters available in the form of fiction and entertainment as well!
Buy New and Used Books For Cheap
What better way to save a couple of dollars than to look for hand-me-downs? These websites facilitating the sale of used textbooks can be another option:
Bookfishing: http://bookfishing.com.sg
Secondhandbooks: www.secondhandbooks.com.sg
Alternatively, make friends with the seniors in school. After a taxing semester of thoroughly digesting its contents, most seniors are more than happy to pass them on for a small fee. When you’re done with it, pass it on. And so the cycle continues.
Look in your pocket
A recent study reported that currently, 3% of textbooks are digital. However, that number is slated to go up to a possible 25% by 2015. This bodes well for those of us who like to have knowledge at our fingertips- literally.
CourseSmart, one of the largest providers of digital learning material, is now available on android phones as well as the iPhone and the iPad. CourseSmart offers access to 90% of all core higher education textbooks in use in colleges and universities. Simply search for your topic within a single book or by collection and add or edit notes. Can’t find it in CourseSmart? Try Amazon or Inkling (available only on the iPad).
Use Google
If all else fails, forget the textbook. With the internet, virtually all the information you could wish to have is right there in the comfort of your own home. Grab a cup of coffee, get in front of the computer and remember, the search engine is your friend.
Google also provides a service called Google Books, which allows users to search through millions of books from publishers and libraries worldwide.
