What is an Ebook?
Ebook is short for electronic book. An ebook is a "digital file containing a body of text and images suitable for distributing electronically and displaying on-screen in a manner similar to a printed book". You may also see it written as "e-book" or "eBook".
How Can I Access our Ebooks?
Use the tabs above in this guide for more information
There are a few things you can do to help reduce eye strain when reading materials online.
For every 20 minutes looking at the screen, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds. This can also help you pace your study time better. It's important to work breaks into your study time rather than trying to cram everything into one long period of time!
Take breaks!
Read in an area that is comfortable and where the ambient lighting around you is not incredibly bright, not also terribly dark. It should be less bright than your device's screen.
Most ereaders have options to zoom in or increase the font size. Consider increasing the font's size.
Not every electronic book has the same features, but many eBooks allow you to highlight text, make notes or comments, and bookmark pages. For example, if you download an eBook and read it in Adobe, you have several of these cool tools:
Step 1: The Full Download! To use many of these features, you'll need to download an eBook. For class textbooks, there may be totally different layouts with different download buttons. In the library search, you may see a button at the top-right (after opening a book) that says Full Download. To download a book, you may need to create an account.
Note: Full text available vs Digital Versions: Some library ebooks will show digital versions available. Only one student can access one of these books at a time and they don't have the different handy ebook features. Those listed with with Full Text Availability, often from EBSCOhost or another database, should be downloadable and have useful tools.
Some course textbooks will be made available on the LibreTexts website. It has some of its own features and tools. Here is an example Libretexts book.
At the bottom-left of a textbook homepage you can:
When on a content page, there are PDF download links at the top-right of the content.
Free and always there for you! We buy ebook copies just like we buy print book copies, except instead of someone checking them out for weeks at a time (like with print books), these are always on our website. If we have more people trying to use them than we have copies available, you will only have to wait (at most) 1 hour before someone else is removed and put to wait their turn while you use the book for at least an hour.
No need to visit the library or put things on hold. Just access them on our website!
That's it! Now you can open the book, view it anytime you want, print pages or entire sections from it. Many OER books from LibreText, OpenStax, or other locations even have cheap options for printing the book if you want to do that.
Most of the time your eBook will be linked to from within your course syllabus or course units. If not, you can view the section below on saving links to your books!
If a book isn't linked to from within your course or syllabus, you can easily bookmark hyperlinks to open them again later! You might even ask your teacher to add a hyperlink to the book in their course for easier use.
Option 1: Library Books
If you book is a library book, when you find it within OneSearch and click on the title to open it, there is a "Permalink" option available (shown below). This allows you to get a link directly to this item. You can then bookmark that link in your browser by bookmarking your current tab, then going to your bookmarks, right-clicking on that bookmark, and selecting edit bookmark. Replace the URL listed with the text you copied from the permalink option.
Option 2: Open Education Resources / Website Books
If a book is available on the internet, rather than the library website, you can simply bookmark the web page it's located on. I would suggest bookmarking the page it's housed on rather than the book itself. To the right of your address bar in the top of your browser window, you should have a little star icon that you can click to bookmark a page.