These Online Resources Will Help You Find Free College Textbooks
In the 2021-2022 academic year, the average college student spent between $628 and $1,471 on textbooks and supplies. Since the price of textbooks typically increases by an average of 12% with each new edition, this cost will only increase. There are several things students can do to try to reduce these costs: rent a textbook instead of buying one, buy from a second-hand bookstore, or buy a previous edition (and pray that the basic principles of the subject haven’t changed significantly since then). and now). But there are also several websites that provide searchable databases to see if the textbooks a student needs are available for free download.
By searching the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) of the required textbooks, you can find the exact textbook you are looking for without having to pay the absurd price quoted by the publisher. Here are a few websites you should check out before spending money on this semester’s textbooks.
Library Genesis . Considered the “Mecca” of free textbook downloads on the Internet, the Genesis Library is the first stop for any student who wants to find a PDF of the textbooks they need. Its simple interface allows users to search by author, title or ISPN. The Genesis Library claims to contain over 2.4 million non-fiction books, 80 million scientific journal articles, as well as millions of comic book files, fiction books, and hundreds of thousands of magazine issues.
Place for a free book . Free Book Spot is a website that does not actually host PDFs of textbooks, but instead links users to websites that host the textbooks they are interested in. However, Free Book Spot contains hundreds of thousands of books in dozens of categories. If the book you want is not listed, there is a queue to download your request so system administrators can try to track it down.
PDF disk . PDF Drive is an online PDF search engine hosting over 75 million e-books, magazines and articles. With an intuitive interface, PDF Drive allows users to preview files before downloading (important since the site only allows 100MB downloads for free). It also lets you bookmark links so you can come back to them later if you ever need to easily track down a PDF you haven’t downloaded.
The return car . Any researcher’s best friend, and it’s no surprise that the Wayback Machine also helps when it comes to downloading free textbooks. The Wayback Machine not only holds screenshots of over 700 billion web pages over the years, but also holds a collection of over six million books that can be easily searched by title, author, or ISBN.
Project Gutenberg . Named after the famous inventor of the printing press, Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free e-books. A volunteer project founded by writer Michael J. Hart stated that its mission is to “provide the whole world with as many e-books in as many formats as possible to be read in as many languages as possible in order to break down the barriers of ignorance and illiteracy.” . ” Their collection is available in plain text, as well as HTML, PDF, EPUB, MOBI and Plucker formats where available.
Assayer . The Assayer is an online catalog of books that have been made available for free by their authors. Founded in 2000, The Assayer differs from other resources in that it focuses on books related to mathematics, science, and computers. This platform also allows you to leave reviews of the books you have read and interact with other readers if you enjoy it.
Open Library . The open library works just like it sounds; users can “check out” the book and return access to it once you’ve finished reading. While he may not have a ton of textbooks, he does have classics that often find their way into curriculum. What makes Open Library stand out is that its collection can be translated into multiple languages, including Spanish, French, German, Czech, and more.