How to find textbooks online for free: a post.
Textbooks are fucking expensive, and if your professor doesnât require a physical copy (most donât - they just want you to have the book at hand. Or maybe even not. Some professors literally give no fucks about whether you have the book or not) and you donât mind having your copy as an electronic copy - this is the post for you!
Most textbook companies put out new editions every year or so even though there isnât really that much new information. Sometimes theyâll eliminate questions if itâs something like a math or chemistry book or theyâll add in a few sentences about updated legislation (the professor I work for teaches human sexuality, and the newest edition of the book she uses included the 2009 decision to allow same-sex couples have hospital visitation rights). These new editions are pointless and only created to make the textbook company money and to cut down on students selling to each other. Youâre going to ignore that. We love older editions. Make sure when youâre searching on the following sites that you donât include the edition number to give you more search results. If one with your edition comes up - great! If not, you can usually stick to something one to three editions behind without any major changes.
I should also mention that checking your schoolâs library for a book you can check out to either keep for the semester or scan the pages you need is also a great option. I saved $90 the semester after I wrote this by borrowing a chemistry lab manual from the library and just scanning the labs I needed instead of buying one for myself that I couldnât even sell later on.
Sites you should be searching:
FilesTube - FilesTube searches THE ENTIRE INTERNET for files uploaded to file-sharing websites such as Rapidshare, Mediafire, or WuUpload. Sometimes people will upload pdf files of your textbook. This is always an important first search.
Google Books - You usually wonât find your textbook on Google Books, but itâs always worth a look. Sometimes pages are missing because itâs only a preview of the book, but again - always worth a look.
Scribd - People upload documents to Scribd and by becoming a member (free!) or connecting through Facebook (if youâre lazy!), you can download whatever files you may find. This sometimes includes textbooks.
BookBoon - website specifically for finding pdf versions of textbooks
Curriki - free open source materials
Flat World Knowledge - free business, humanities, and science textbooks
California Learning Resource Network
Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
TorrentScan - textbooks are also uploaded to torrent sites in some cases - you may as well check.
If push comes to shove, you can try variations of googling âtextbook name torrentâ or âtextbook name downloadâ or âtextbook name download free.â Sometimes things pop up and I never would have known about them.
LibraryPirate is a torrent search site specifically for textbooks. (Added 10 October 2011)
AMAZING Reddit post (Added 2 November 2011)
JenkThat - I havenât tried this out yet, but Iâve heard good things from others. Itâs also a good place to find other ebooks that arenât textbooks. (Added 29 December 2011)
Bookfi - I just briefly looked at this site and searched for a few common terms and it looks great! Download links are provided straight from the search results. Definitely useful! (Added 1 August 2012)
Iâve found all 8 of my textbooks for this term (19 credit hours, six classes) through one of the methods above. Iâm not even going to look at retail prices, but checking BigWords.com (which, if you want to buy your books/canât find them anywhere with one of the previous methods, will give you the cheapest price on the internet), I saved $497.87 by doing this. It takes time, but itâs definitely worth almost $500 worth of time. If you know of more ways to find free textbooks - please let me know!
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