Why use E-books?

One of the main advantages of E-Books over print is that they can be viewed online 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They also do not count towards your library borrower allowance and some can be downloaded to continue working with offline. However,certain titles may be limited on the number of people who can read them at a single time, so if at first an E-Book does not allow you access it is always worth trying again later.  

The Library subscribes to four main E-Book platforms: Ebook Central, Browns, EBSCOhost and Taylor & Francis. 

You can print, copy and paste extracts from E-Books for your own use, within the terms and conditions specified by the provider. 

For more information about accessing and using E-books, see our E-book Help Guide.

Other E-books freely available on the web:

• Bartleby.com  Literary classics including the King James Bible, Shakespeare, fiction and non-fiction.
• Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) - The DOAB aims to make Open-Access E-books easier to find. The directory is open to publishers of academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.
• Google Books - millions of E-Books available to view in 'Full View' (full text of book available) and 'Limited Preview' (only a limited number of pages from the book are available to view). Those books with limited preview are still in copyright, and their pages displayed with the permission of publishers and authors.
• Gutenberg-e - a collaboration between Columbia University Press and the American Historical Association, committed to promoting the electronic publication of scholarly writing in the Humanities.
• Internet Archive - The ‘Texts’ collection of the Internet Archive includes digitized books from various libraries around the world, including special collections. Internet Archive offers permanent access to collections of other digitised materials, including websites, music and moving images.
• Internet Classics Archive - Works of classical literature, mainly Greco-Roman (some Chinese and Persian), all in English translation.
• National Academies Press - The National Academies Press (NAP) of the United States publishes books within the science, engineering, and health disciplines, which can be downloaded for free in PDF format. See the website's frequently asked questions guide to find out how to do this.

• OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) aims to improve the visibility and usability of academic research by aggregating peer reviewed Open-Access publications from across Europe.
• The Online Books Page This site lists free books on the Web including a special exhibit listings, such as A Celebration of Women Writers and Prize Winning Books Online.
• Perseus Digital Library Project Includes: Primary and secondary sources for the study of ancient Greece and Rome; Art & Archaeology Artifact Browser; Primary and secondary sources in early modern English literature.
• Prize-winning books online Read online the complete text of books that have won major literary prizes, like the Newbery Award, the Nobel Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize.
• Project Euclid - Euclid is jointly managed by Cornell and the Duke University Press and provides free access to journals, conference proceedings and monographs in the field of theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics.
• Project Gutenberg – Project Gutenberg aims to digitise and archive books by freely providing them in electronic formats. The collection is made up of books whose copyrights have expired or whose authors have permitted free redistribution.