Subject Guides: Open Access Resources in German Studies (OARGS): Books

Current Publishers' Books

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) DOAB is a discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find open access book publishers. Browsable by subject, language, publisher and more. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.
Open Book Publishers - German Studies This listing of open book publishing houses has a browse function that filters down to German Studies (among its many disciplines), with a resultant list of open access books.
Open Research Library Guides and links to OA titles and metadata from reputable publishers (Berghahn, Mohr-Siebeck, Brill) in concert with research and educational institutions. This subset is one example of the quality and disciplinary range of German Studies publications. A service of "Knowledge Unlatched" from Berlin.

Current and Retrospective Titles

The Online Book Page For Library of Congress call number access to books, such prefixes as PT (German literature), DB (Austrian and Central European history), DD (German history), DQ (Swiss History) lead to public domain books in various repositories and to contemporary books published through open access initiatives.

Retrospective Digital Libraries

Austrian Books Online (ABO) The Austrian National Library, in cooperation with Google Books, has thus far added around 600,000 books to this library. Being very conservative about copyright, titles must be 140 years from publication date to appear online. Search via ÖNB catalog, this website, or Europeana, the European digital library.
Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library) A catalog to tens of millions of German books and other objects, of which about a third are digitally accessible (quickly identifiable via a search filter). German and English interfaces.
Deutsches Textarchiv - DTA (German Text Archive) Separate German-language texts from numerous disciplines including belles lettres, sourced from the early 16th to the early 20th century. As a whole, they form a reference corpus for the New High German language.
HathiTrust Digital Library A long-term preservation collective of public-domain titles. German provides, after English, the second largest number of works. PDF facsimiles of originals and well as their transcriptions are available for downloading. A separate HathiTrust research corpus makes linguistic data from 18 million books available.
Internet Archive Internet Archive is a (self-described) "non-profit library of millions of freely accessible books, movies, software, music, websites and more." It is also the jumping-off point for the Wayback Machine, which revisits Internet pages from the past.
Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg, with search and browse tools, was established early in the eBook era. After a browse by topic, a link will guide you to related subjects. Copyright permission is set at U.S. levels and access in other countries may vary.
Sophie Digital Library of Works by German-Speaking Women An open-access, full-text-searchable source of literature written by German-speaking women from medieval times through the early 20th century. Around 6500 original works and parallel transcriptions where possible. Part of the BYU institutional repository.
Zentrales Verzeichnis Digitalisierter Drucke - zvdd (Central Index to [German] Digitized Print Works) The zvdd is a broad access portal to German printed works from the 15th century forward that have been digitized. This link is to a list of collections by institution, but other types of searches are also possible.

Open Textbooks

A Foundation Course in Reading German Identified by both the "OER Commons" and the "Open Textbook Library" initiatives, this University of Wisconsin Press text designed to "[guide] a learner who has no previous German experience to gain the ability to accurately understand formal written German prose, aided only by a comprehensive dictionary."
Der und mehr - German Language Textbook This language teaching textbook from ALG (Affordable Learning Georgia) is developed as a supplement to another project from Princeton entitled "der | die | das. (dddgerman.org)" The latter requires a sign in via social media.
Grenzenlos Deutsch: an open-access curriculum for beginning German It is "intended as a no-cost alternative to... more traditional textbooks in the field, [mixing] materials rooted in real-world, contemporary communication scenarios, multimedia content, and online learning activities... and [ensuring] that the topics... in the classroom are relevant to and reflect today’s world."
Willkommen: Deutsch für alle Written by Claudia Kost and Crystal Sawatzky and subtitled: Introductory German - Task Based - Blended - Inclusive, it was published by Pressbooks at the Univeristy of Alberta.

Examples of Individual Open Access Books

Evers, Kai. "Violent Modernism. The Aesthetics of Destruction in Twentieth-Century Literature." A collaboration between Northwestern University Press and the open-access service provider Knowledge Unlatched produced this title. The book can be read online rather than via PDF download.
Fuchs, Christian. "Rereading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism" In a rereading of Marx, the author, a professor at the University of Westminster, sees open access projects as digital utopias and a counter to exploitation. Fittingly, this title is freely accessible on a Creative Commons license by Knowledge Unlatched and the Pluto Press.
McLelland, Nicola. "German Through English Eyes: A History of Language Teaching and Learning in Britain 1500–2000" Through Harrassowitz Verlag in Wiesbaden, this title is offered as a merchandisable book for research libraries, but is available in PDF downloads for individual researchers.
"Die Österreich-Ungarischen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch" Published in Berlin by National-Verlag in 1923 (and thus squarely in the public domain), this title has been processed as an interactive transcription source for daily Austro-Hungarian letters, telegrams, notes and other official documents from June-August 1914 on the outbreak of World War One.