eBooks
A guide to eBooks at the University of Winnipeg, including viewing, searching, and downloading eBooks in our collections.
For a more comprehensive list of Open Access resources, including ebooks, please visit the Scholarly Communications and Open Access and the Open Educational Resources research guides.
Open Access Books and Monographs
- Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
As stated on the doabooks.org site, the purpose of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB): “is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The directory will be open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.”
Open Book Aggregators
- Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN)Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN) provides free, peer-reviewed, open access e-books (monographs), and edited volumes pertaining to the social sciences and the humanities found here. Further still, OAPEN uses various Creative Commons licenses to provide authors with the means to direct the usage and further dissemination of their works (i.e., attribution, third parties use, commercial use, and derivative works).
- Open Research LibraryThe Open Research Library (ORL) is planned to include all Open Access book content worldwide on one platform for user-friendly discovery, offering a seamless experience navigating more than 20,000 Open Access books. This vital infrastructure is slated to comprise the most comprehensive collection of peer-reviewed Open Access books accessible for everyone.
- Open Textbook LibraryThe Open Textbook Library is an online catalog of open textbooks based at the University of Minnesota Center for Open Education, including nearly 1000 textbooks across disciplines. Accepts only completed works available under open licenses, portable file formats, and "in use at multiple higher educational institutions, or affiliated with a higher education institution, scholarly society, or professional organization".
- Publishers of OA BooksA large list of Open Monograph Publishers, part of the Open Access Directory.
- WikibooksWikibooks is a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit. Set up almost exactly as Wikipedia, the content is in various languages. There are over 37,000 books that can be viewed by subject. Books are in wiki format (see the example on Art History). Creative Commons and GNU Free Documentation licensing is used. Print copies are not available.