This guide gives an introduction
to electronic books that are available to you.
The Library subscribes to a growing number of e-books from a variety of suppliers and publishers. The entire texts are available online for users to browse, print sections from and in some cases, download to your PC. They can include features such as electronic bookmarking, online dictionaries and search facilities.
You can search for e-books that we subscribe to on the Library catalogue, as you would a printed work.
Not all e-books have catalogue entries at the moment. It can be better to search for individual titles within the resource itself. You can access collections such as this either from the list below or from the Online Resources page in the Electronic Library.
An increasing number of e-books and texts, usually classic works of history and literature, are freely available on the internet. A selection of sites offering free e-books can be found below.
E-book collections (to which we have a paid subscription)
| Cambridge Histories Online | Contains more than 250 volumes covering histories of the US and Britain, as well as more general areas covering economics, politics, religion, music, literary studies and language. |
| ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) | Digital images of every page of 150,000 books published during the 18th Century, thus providing access to critical information in the fields of history, literature, religion, law, fine arts, science and more. It is possible to search within the full-text of approximately 33 million pages. You can print and download images. |
| EEBO (Early English Books Online) | Contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700. Fully searchable. You can print and download the page images. The contents of EEBO is now accessible through the Library catalogue. |
| Oxford Scholarship Online History E-Books Collection | A collection of E-books published by OUP. Subjects include American History from early to 20th Century; British Early Modern, Medieval and Modern History; Cultural History; Economic History; European Early Modern, Medieval and Modern History; History of Ideas; History of Science, Technology and Medicine; Military History and Social History. |
| Oxford Scholarship Online Linguistics E-Books Collection | A collection of E-books published by OUP. A collection of electronic books published by OUP. Subjects include English Language; Historical Linguistics; Language Families; Phonetics/Phonology; Psycholinguistics/Neurolinguistics/Cognitive Linguistics; Semantics and Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics/Anthropological Linguistics; Syntax and Morphology and Theoretical Linguistics. |
| Oxford Scholarship Online Philosophy E-Books Collection | A collection of e-books published by OUP in the field of Philosophy. Subjects include: Aesthetics; Ancient Philosophy; Feminist Philosophy; General; History of Philosophy; Logic / Philosophy of Mathematics; Metaphysics / Epistemology; Moral Philosophy; Philosophy of Language; Philosophy of Mind; Philosophy of Religion; Philosophy of Science and Political Philosophy. |
| Oxford Scholarship Online Political Science E-Books Collection | A collection of e-books published by OUP in the field of Political Science. Topics include American politics, European Union, international relations, political economy and Russian politics. You can browse by title or search the collection. |
| MyILibrary | We have purchased a number of e-books covering a range of subject areas, available from the MyILibrary interface. |
| NetLibrary | We have purchased a number of e-books across a variety of subject areas. |
| Safari Technical Books | A fully searchable collection of 464 full text e-books in the field of computing. Four concurrent users permitted. |
| Science Direct (for Elsevier E-book titles) | We have bought access to a number of e-books from Elsevier which are accessible via ScienceDirect. To browse e-books, click on Browse along top green menu. From next screen, select "Full text available" and limit to "All books" on lefthand menu. A list of all e-books will then be displayed. |
| Taylor and Francis Business and Economics E-Book Collection | A collection of 100 bestselling titles from Taylor and Francis on Business and Economics. |
| Taylor and Francis Media and Film Studies E-Book Collection | A collection of 248 leading textbooks, reference works and research monographs on Media and Film studies . |
E-book collections (freely available)
| Alex collection of electronic texts | A full text indexed collection of classic American and English literature as well as Western philosophy, written or translated into English. |
| Bartleby.com | The full text of many classic literary works, including Shakespeare. |
| Bookboon | On Bookboon you can download free online textbooks. All the books are available in PDF and you can download them directly. The textbooks are legal and written for Bookboon by academics from different European universities. *Warning* the books are financed by in-book adverts. |
| CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts | CELT, the Corpus of Electronic Texts, brings the wealth of Irish literary and historical culture to the Internet. It has a searchable online database consisting of contemporary and historical texts from many areas, including literature and the other arts. |
| Internet Public Library | 45000+ full text works, fiction and non-fiction plus online reference works. Divided into subject collections for easy browsing but also fully searchable. |
| Online books page | A web site listing over 25,000 free books on the Web |
| Oxford Text Archive | The archive holds several thousand electronic texts and linguistics corpora, in a variety of languages. Includes online versions of works by individual authors, standard reference works and a range of language corpora. |
| Project Gutenberg | A fully searchable collection of 18000+ multi-language e-books. Many classic titles and other formats such as audio books. It has a fully searchable online catalogue. |
| WikiBooks | A collection of free, open-content textbooks that you can edit yourself. Covers all subject areas, including Humanities, Social Sciences, Computers, Natural Sciences. This type of resource can contain incorrect information, please do not use these books as your only source of information. |
Special Collections hold several archival collections of interest to you: for example, rare books represented in EEBO/ECCO. For further information please contact Special Collections.
