A collection of free, accessible textbooks.\
by Jamal Mazrui
July 2020
Available from
http://GitHub.com/JamalMazrui/AccTextbooks
I love books and regularly buy commercial books from Audible, Kindle, and other sources. Like others, I also appreciate finding value for free. A movement called open educational resources (OER) has been encouraging teachers at all levels to create and release learning materials that anyone can use. My web searches in this area identified many college-level textbooks on a broad range of subjects.
I seek to add value by curating these search results into an organized collection of quality books that are easy to download from a single web page. This collection of about 300 books addresses the following subjects among others:
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Physical sciences such as astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, and physics.
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Social studies such as anthropology, business, economics, government, history, psychology, and sociology.
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Methodological areas such as accessibility, accounting, communications, mathematics, programming, and statistics.
The collection tries to maximize accessibility to readers who use assistive technology or mobile devices, choosing reflowable EPUB over fixed-page PDF, when a book was found in both formats. From either format, I also produced HTML and plain text versions (without pictures) by automated means, so learners can pick the option that works best with their reading system. Each file is clearly named by the title of its book content, without extraneous words or codes. All .htm versions and all .txt versions may be downloaded together in the archive files named AccTextbooks_htm.zip and AccTextbooks_txt.zip, respectively.
If you have a Git client, you can clone the whole collection via the following URL (the web address of the repository):
http://GitHub.com/JamalMazrui/AccTextbooks
Happy reading!