eBooks and Digital Repositories 

Books in digital format can offer convenient access and enhanced search capabilities beyond what a print book can offer.  This guide presents ebook and repository options available to campus users and beyond.

Use eBooks in your research as you'd use print books including:  for overview information (i.e. a book on feminist literary criticism) advanced learning (a book on trigonometry); for basic information not normally presented in articles (a detailed biography or financial investment information); for historical information, and for reading pleasure.

When you do a search for a print book, as described in the Auraria Library guide Books: How to Find Them, eBooks will quite often turn up in your search results.  This guide offers tips for specifically pinpointing books in ebook format.

Picture credit: Floating Book: Vapourtrails

Click on the subject group below to find ebook databases and websites for that topic area.

Children's Literature

History and Literature

Non-English Language

Plays

Science and Medicine

Digital Repository Search Sites

eBook Tutorial - Quick, easy, tutorial on finding ebooks at Auraria.

You'll find tens of thousands of ebooks* by searching in Skyline, Auraria Library's catalog. To pinpoint ebooks on your topic:

• Do a Word search on the Skyline search page.
• Search as you would for a print book, i.e. by title, keywords describing what you need, subject, whatever you wish.
• Choose the Material Type pull down box and limit your search to: ebooks (close to the bottom of the pull-down menu)

Need a reputable online reference book like an encyclopedia? An overview of a topic or a definition? Follow the steps below:

• Do a Word search on the Skyline search page.
• Search by keyword
• Choose a keyword to describe your topic and combine it with the word encyclopedias, handbooks, or dictionaries. Examples: psychology encyclopedias; philosophy dictionaries; chemistry handbooks
• Choose the Material Type pull down box and limit your search to: ebooks

*Below are the ebook titles and collections included in Skyline that you search when you follow the steps above or the eBook Tutorial.  (They may also be searched individually). Those with a checkmark are free via the web.  Others are available to Auraria campus users.

NetLibrary. More than 16,000 ebooks from numerous publishers.

Gale Virtual Reference Library. (GVRL). A database of scholarly multidisciplinary encyclopedias and specialized reference sources.

Duke eBook Collection. More than a thousand Duke University Press ebooks in the social sciences and humanities.

Greenwood Digital Collection. eBooks on all subject disciplines.

Women Writer's Online. (WWO) From the Women Writers Project at Brown University. WWO presents online editions of texts by English and American women published between 1500 and 1830. It also includes introductory essays by contemporary scholars about Renaissance women writers, their texts, and related topics and supplies links to other textual databases and a collection of syllabi.

Oxford English Dictionary (OED Online)

ABC-CLIO ebooks. Reference ebooks on multiple disciplines.

Knovel Library.  An extensive collection of reference ebook titles in science and engineering. Content includes data handbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, monographs, conference proceedings and datasets. Many of the reference works are embedded with Knovel's productivity tools for data analysis.

SpringerLink eBooks. Scientific, technical, and medical books and journals from Springer-Verlag, a major scientific publisher for over 150 years plus works from Urban and Vogel, Steinkopff, Kluwer and Birkhauser.

eBrary ebooks.  A growing collection of ebooks covering all topics from a varitey of publishers.

HathiTrust ebooks.  The HathiTrust has digitized University collection books.  10,000 are part of the Auraria Library catalog and more are searchable here.  √

Free ebooks. Selected from such collections as GoogleBooks, Internet Archive, and Bartleby.com and cataloged for the Auraria Library collection.√ 

The collections below cover all topics.  However, the bulk of the titles in these freely accessible collections will be older titles.  Note that the Library does purchase current books in ebook format.  (See: Finding eBooks via the Auraria Library Catalog.) 

Google Book Search. To locate full-text books online, not just excerpts, do an advanced search and choose to search 'full view only.'

HathiTrust.  This impressive collection now contains millions of titles digitized from University collections.

Internet Archive. IA is a non-profit venture founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format, including text and media resources.

Digital Book Index. This index is intended as a "Meta-index" since it searches most major eBook sites as well as thousands of smaller specialized sites.

Great Books Online Also known as Bartleby.com, "the preeminent publisher of literature, reference, and verse" ebooks free on the Web.

Project Gutenberg This collection is the 'grandfather of ebooks' having been the first major free ebook web site.

Online Books Page. Maintained by the University of Pennsylvania Library.

Munsey's. (Previously Black Mask) More than 20,000 ebooks in multiple formats.

eScholarship editions.  More than 700 titles free from the University of California Press.

Making of America collections from Cornell University and the University of Michigan.  Each University hosts a Making of America site featuring digital libraries of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.

Best Places to Get Free Books: The Ultimate Guide - From Friedbeef's Tech. This site lists both audiobooks and text only books. A mixture of great and marginal recommendations so browse with care.