The Open Handbook Commons is a community project that creates practical books about everyday life skills. Our goal is to make useful knowledge available to everyone, no matter where they live or what their background is.
The books cover simple and practical topics that help people in daily life. These include skills such as cooking, sewing and mending, home repair, basic survival, outdoor skills, digital literacy, and other useful knowledge. All books are written in simplified English so they are easier to read and understand, including for people who are not native English speakers.
Our books are released as downloadable, print-ready PDF files. Anyone can read them on a computer or phone, or print them and share them with others.
Every book published by this project is released under the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license. This means you are free to download, print, share, and adapt the material for personal and educational use. You must give proper credit, and any modified versions must use the same license. Commercial printing or selling the books is not allowed without permission.
All repositories in this organization are also licensed under CC BY-NC-SA unless a repository states otherwise.
This project depends on community contributions. People can help in many ways. Some contributions are technical, such as writing new sections, editing chapters, or helping with the tools used to build and publish the books. Others are simpler, such as correcting typos and grammar, checking facts, identifying possible plagiarism, suggesting improvements, or helping make the text clearer.
We track suggestions and changes mainly through GitHub, where contributors can open issues, submit pull requests, or start conversations using the Discussions tab. Visit our website https://openhandbook.org to see the full list of books and links to their GitHub repositories.
If you are not familiar with GitHub, you can still contribute. Simply send your suggestions or corrections by email to contact@openhandbook.org, and we will review them and include them in the project.
The information in these books is provided for education, learning, and hobby use only and is shared “as is.” We do not guarantee that all information is complete or suitable for every situation. The Open Handbook Commons and its contributors are not responsible for any problems, damages, or losses that may result from using this information. Readers are responsible for making sure that any use of the information is safe and lawful.
Some content may be written or edited with the help of AI tools, especially to convert text into simplified English - all content is reviewed by human contributors.
The community works to avoid plagiarism and to respect the work of others. If you find content that may be copied without proper credit or permission, please report it to contact@openhandbook.org, and we will review it.