A FREE EDUCATION FOR ALL THE
WORLD'S PEOPLE!
A blog for homework help, research papers, university-level free courses, and much more. Perfect for students, teachers, researchers, self-learners, geeks, thinkers, seekers, edupunks, dropouts, autodidacts, and other chronically curious folk.
WHY?
Why spend all of your time and money
on going to college to get a degree
to get a job?
So you can spend all of your time
and money on paying for your college
and your degree?
Why do that when you can simply
DOWNLOAD
thousands of
university and ivy league level courses
from all over the planet
FOR FREE
listen to them on your iPod
and simply START your own enterprises
your own technologies
your own carnivals
your own everything
with you and all friends instead?
Why?
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of
thinking we used when we created them." - Einstein
OddEdges
Academic Earth ~ MitWorld ~ OpenCulture ~ European Graduate School ~ Peer2Peer University ~ WolframAlpha ~ University of the People ~ RCampus ~ YaleTube ~ MITOCW ~ Princeton WebMedia ~ Merlot ~ GiantCampus ~ OpenCourseWare Consortium ~ LearnersTV ~ SchoolTube ~ Online Edu Database ~ Forum Network ~ LectureFox ~ World Lecture Hall ~ VideoLectures ~ John's Hopkins OCW ~ FreeVideoLectures ~
UniLeaks ~ KhanAcademy ~ Internet Academy ~ Wikiversity ~ Zotero
...and many more! Check our ARCHIVE on top
Smart is the new sexy
Sciencedump is a source for short, interesting and inspiring science, design and art videos. We wished we were great inventors, top scientists, super entrepreneurs but we are not :) Instead we like to watch interesting science projects, smart people and innovative ideas and wanted to share that with you.
LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain. The LibriVox objective is “to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet”. LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books.
In April 2012, it had a catalogue of over 5,400 unabridged books and shorter works available to download and produced on average 90 audiobooks per month. Around ninety percent of the collection is in English, although LibriVox recordings are available in 33 languages altogether.
Textbooks are fucking expensive, and if your professor doesn’t require a physical copy (most don’t - 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 don’t 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 isn’t really that much new information. Sometimes they’ll eliminate questions if it’s something like a math or chemistry book or they’ll 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. You’re going to ignore that. We love older editions. Make sure when you’re searching on the following sites that you don’t 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.
Sites you should be searching:
- FilesTube - FilesTube searches THE ENTIRE INTERNET for files uploaded to file-sharing websites such as MegaUpload, Mediafire, or WuUpload. Sometimes people will upload pdf files of your textbook. This is always an important first search.
- Google Books - You usually won’t find your textbook on Google Books, but it’s always worth a look. Sometimes pages are missing because it’s 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 you’re 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
- Open Culture
- 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 “textbook name torrent” or “textbook name download” or “textbook name download free.” 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 haven’t tried this out yet, but I’ve heard good things from others. It’s also a good place to find other ebooks that aren’t textbooks. (Added 29 December 2011)
I’ve found all 8 of my textbooks for this term (19 credit hours, six classes) through one of the methods above. I’m not even going to look at retail prices, but checking BigWords.com (which, if you want to buy your books/can’t 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 it’s definitely worth almost $500 worth of time. If you know of more ways to find free textbooks - please let me know!
(via absurdreasoning)
