LibGuides: English: eBooks

Online Books Page

An updated list of freely available e-books maintained by John Mark Ockerbloom at the University of Pennsylvania Library.

Free eBook sites

Alex: A Catalogue of Electronic Texts on the Internet
This is a collection of public domain and open access documents with a focus on American and English literature as well as Western philosophy.
American Verse Project
The project is assembling an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920. One can conduct simple searches (single word and phrase searches throughout the entire corpus), proximity searches (the co-occurrence of two or three words or phrases), and Boolean searches (combinations of two or three words in a given paragraph or verse, as well as using the word index to browse through lists of all unique words in the texts, and thecitation search to identify works by author and titl
Bartleby.com
A comprehensive public reference library containing a searchable database of reference, verse, and classic literature. The site is divided into four sections: Reference, Verse, Fiction, and Nonfiction. Recently added were the 1914 Oxford Edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare and the Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th edition
A Celebration of Women Writers
"The Celebration of Women Writers recognizes the contributions of women writers throughout history. Women have written almost every imaginable type of work: novels, poems, letters, biographies, travel books, religious commentaries, histories, economic and scientific works. Our goal is to promote awareness of the breadth and variety of women's writing. "
Complete Works of William Shakespeare
The web's first complete collection of Shakespeare's works.
Digital Book Index
• "Digital Book Index provides access to more than 65,000 titles records . . . [it] gathers both commercial and non-commercial eBooks from more than 1800 publishers and private publishing organizations. Titles range from the Ancient Agriculture to Space Flight. An extensive Reference section includes more than 2000 Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, Thesauri, Glossaries, Bibliographies, Timelines, Chronologies, Literary Histories, and includes, as well, a section on Writing & Style Guides . . ."
Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature
A comprehensive anthology and guide to English literature of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Seventeenth Century, Restoration and Eighteenth Century.
Poet's Corner
"The goal of this ongoing project is to develop a user-friendly library that is both a useful reference and an appealing place to browse and explore - and there is plenty of material here to explore. The collection covers roughly 7,000 works by about 800 poets - including some of the best known works in the English language - and many obscure and forgotten works that are well worth reading ."
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg offers over 36,000 free ebooks to download to your PC, Kindle, Android, iOS or other portable device. Choose between ePub, Kindle, HTML and simple text formats.

Introduction to eBooks

eBooks come in a variety of formats from a variety of places. Some eBooks (usually ones that are no longer copyrighted) are free. Other more recent eBooks are accessible through EBSCO eBooks, ProQuest Ebook Central, and through the State Library of Kansas' Digital Book eLending site..

You can search for ebooks from EBSCO and ProQuest using College Library's book catalog (Voyager) Look for book records with the phrase "electronic resource" as part of the title OR for the location ebrary, ProQuest, Netlibrary, etc. You can tell an ebook is an ebook because it doesn't have a physical location and the status will be "No information available."

Bethel College Library Catalog

What is ProQuest Ebook Central?

is an electronic book collection that spans all academic subject areas and grows at a rate of about 6,000 new titles per year. The College Library has access to ebrary's Academic Complete Collection that currently includes over 138,000 titles. Users can search for ebooks by title, author, ISBN, LC call number, etc. or browse by publisher or subject. By creating a ebrary bookshelf account, users can manage a virtual bookshelf where they can store, highlight, search, take notes, create folders and even share ebooks.

Search Ebook Central now.

eBooks from EBSCO

The College Library owns almost 18,000 electronic books through EBSCOHost.

They are primarily from academic publishers and complement our book collection. Subjects covered in the collection include business, education, history, literature, and more. Most of the books are in .pdf format. You can read these books on your computer or download them to a portable device.

Search EBSCO eBooks now

Click below to see a library guide with instructions for using EBSCO eBooks

Google Books

Why use Google Books?

The advantages:

it's a good "discovery tool" - if the book is out of copyright, or the publisher has given permission, you'll be able to see a preview of the book, and in some cases the entire text. If it's in the public domain, you can read the full book
it can help you identify journals and/or authors that cover your topic
you can search the fulltext of the books - use “Search in this Book” to narrow or focus your search on more specific terms
you can retrieve both books and articles in a single search

What is Google Books NOT good for?

The limitations are:

your results will include all kinds of books, including children's, popular AND scholarly. There is no way to select only scholarly material.
you can't sort the results
it's not helpful for accessing current/popular books (copyright issues)
the quality of reproduction in digitization can be inconsistent
not everything is full text - search our library catalog or request the book via interlibrary loan

A sampling of Comm books in ebrary

Quotatives by Isabelle Buchstaller
ISBN: 0470657189
Publication Date: 2013-12-04
Romancing the Brand by Tim Halloran
ISBN: 1118611284
Publication Date: 2014-01-07
The Ultimate Daily Show and Philosophy by William Irwin (Contribution by); Jason Holt (Volume Editor)
ISBN: 1118397681
Publication Date: 2013-08-26
You, the People: American National Identity in Presidential Rhetoric by Vanessa B. Beasley
ISBN: 1603442987
Publication Date: 2011-11-07