What is an e-book?

• The term e-book is an abbreviation for electronic book. It means a book that is available in full text online.
• Some e-books are old books that are no longer subject to copyright and have been scanned and made available on the web. These old books might be included in a freely accessible database like Google Books, or they might be in a database like Early English Books Online, for which the Library pays a subscription.
• The most useful e-books are usually the recently published books that are still subject to copyright. Some of these are made available free online by the organisations that publish them, but in many cases the Library has to pay so that UQ users can access these books. E-books that the Library pays for are normally accessed through databases such as Safari Tech Books Online, MD Consult or EBook Library.
• The UQ Library's e-books do not require special machines.They can be read on any computer (desktop or laptop). They are designed for research, not for recreational reading.

Why should I use e-books?

• E-books are easy to access. You can read them online from home, 24 hours a day.
• You can search the full text of an e-book, to quickly identify the sections of the book that are useful for you.
• You can often copy and paste extracts that you want to quote, although some sites place restrictions on this. Make sure that you reference the source correctly.
• E-books are not very suitable if you need to carefully read a lengthy text. In that case, a printed book would probably be more convenient.

How can I find e-books?

• Many of the e-books that the Library pays for can be located via the Summon tab on the Library homepage.
• Type some keywords in the search box and then click on the Search button.
• When the results are displayed, look for the Content Type on the left-hand side of the results. Check the box for eBook.
• You should now see a list of e-books that match your search terms. You may wish to use the Publication Date slide bar on the left of the screen to limit your results to more recent books.
• To view the full text of any of these e-books, click on the Full text icon.
• Not all the e-books that the Library subscribes to are listed in the Library catalogue. In the case of some large collections of historical source material, such as Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online, you must access those databases via the UQ Library catalogue, and then search for individual e-books in those collections.
• There are millions of mostly older e-books created by large digitisation projects which can be freely accessed via the web. Google Book Search is the largest collection. The HathiTrust Digital Library is another excellent resource. There are also national digitisation projects such as Making of America and Gallica (from France).
• Google Book Search includes many modern books that are still subject to copyright. You will not be able to view the full text of these books online. But you can identify books that would be useful to you, and then you can see if those books are available in the UQ Library. If not, you may be able to obtain them using the Library's Document Delivery service.

How do I search e-books?

• With e-books, you can search every word of the text. Unfortunately there is no database which allows you to simultaneously search the text of all e-books.
• You can search all the e-books in a particular collection, such as Google Books. If you want to search a collection which is only available to subscribers (such as NetLibrary or Oxford Scholarship Online), you must access that collection through the UQ Library catalogue.
• When you are searching a large, full-text database, it is usually better to search for very specific terms. Searching for phrases is often better than searching for words: many databases will allow you to search for a phrase if you enclose it in inverted commas, e.g. "anxiety disorders in children"

Can I download e-books?

• This depends on the e-book collection. Some e-book collections will allow you to download the whole book. Some will allow you to download only one chapter. Some will not allow any downloading, and you must read the book in your web browser.
• Some e-book collections allow you to download an e-book to your computer, but only for a specified time.
• You can read e-books on a handheld device if the e-book collection allows you to download in a format which your handheld device can read.