University of Minnesota: Open Textbook Library
Carnegie Mellon University - Open Learning Initiative
The BCcampus Open Textbook Project British Columbia
MERLOT is a program of the California State University
The Open SUNY Textbooks State University of New York
The following sites are from the content from University of Oklahoma Libraries.
BC Campus OpenEd (open.bccampus.ca/find-open-textbooks) – This site includes texts written specifically for the BC OpenTextbook initiative, as well as books from other sources.
Lumen Learning (https://courses.lumenlearning.com/catalog/lumen) – Lumen provides open courses in a variety of high-demand subjects and disciplines. These courses are collections of high-quality OER, not necessarily as a traditional textbook. You can use them as-is or modify them to fit your instructional style and students’ needs.
HathiTrust (http://www.hathitrust.org) – HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. HathiTrust materials can be searched through the OU Libraries.
The Directory of OpenAccess Books -This site is a clearinghouse of links to books hosted in various locations, and includes a large selection of international textbooks.
Open Access Publishing in European Networks (http://www.oapen.org/home) – The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences. OAPEN has books in multiple languages and covering a large variety of topics. There is a range of licensing for the books, but each books is clearly marked with the license.
Project Gutenberg – A volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works. Most items in this collection are digitized works from the public domain, making it a rich source for those in the Humanities
The National Academies Press (http://www.nap.edu) – Unlike some of the open textbook initiatives these books are publicly available but not openly licensed. You can link to the content, and even link directly to specific pages. However, you cannot remix and redistribute the content.
For more information check the "How to find SSU eBooks LibGuide."
Open Educational Resources (OERs) are teaching and learning materials that are freely available online to students, educators, and the general public. They include textbooks, quizzes, class exercises, videos, and other learning objects that have been openly licensed so that others can adopt or reuse this material for their own purposes. To be more specific, when we say that OERs are openly licensed, we mean that they can be retained, reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed. In practice this means:
(See OpenContent.org, UNESCO and OER Commons for the above definitions).
From Washington State University's Open Educational Resources (OERs): Tools for Affordable Learning: Defining OERs LibGuide
In September 2017, The Affordable College Textbook Act was introduced in Congress in an effort to expand the use of open textbooks while reducing the cost of textbooks for college students.