The university has purchased thousands of electronic books (ebooks) and the number is constantly rising. We also make available many ebooks which are freely availalbe ("open access"). Our collection consists of textbooks, recommended reading and reference material such as how-to books, dictionaries and handbooks.

You can find an ebook in a number of ways:

• Individually by title on the library catalogue or DISCOVER
• Click on the 'Access the ebook' link on your reading list
• By material type (ebooks) on the Advanced Search tab of the library catalogue.
• Using the drop down menu ebook collections on the Digital Library and searching one of the collections

Ebook collections

You will need to use your university username and password to access ebooks, and we do not always have access to every book in each collection.

There are also freely available open access ebook collections at OAPEN, DOAB and Project Gutenberg.

Reading online and downloading ebooks

We have bought most of our ebooks from ProQuest and VLebooks.

We recommend that you select the read online option to access an ebook. This is more straightforward than downloading the book as you will still have full access to all of the book content, but will be able to print a chapter or section of the book (subject to copyright law). The option to print is not available if you choose the download option.

However, if you are aware that you are likely to have no internet access for a while it may be worth choosing the download option. You can download an ebook for up to three days.

If you download ebooks from our library to read offline, you will need the correct software to read them on your laptop or smartphone. Ebooks for download are now largely in ACSM format, which cannot be read by Adobe Acrobat. (This does not affect viewing ebooks online).

Windows/Mac users can download Adobe Digital Editions (https://www.adobe.com/uk/products/digital-editions/download.html).

For smartphones, there are several options. VLE Books provide details of VLEBooks ebook reader for iOS (https://www.vlebooks.com/vleweb/Help/iOSHelp) and Android (https://www.vlebooks.com/vleweb/Help/AndroidHelp).

The Bluefire Reader (http://www.bluefirereader.com/bluefire-reader.html) is also available for iOS, Android and Windows.

If the ebook is in PDF formate you can use Adobe Reader.

If you are still having problems, please contact library.technical@beds.ac.uk.

Single user ebooks

A number of ebooks can only be viewed by one user at a time, due to licensing restrictions laid down by the publisher. To try to offset this difficulty, we have purchased several copies of these titles, which means that more users should be able to access the books simultaneously. However, as prices can be very much higher than print copies, we cannot always purchase as many as we would like and there may be times you may have to wait to access a book.

If you have trouble accessing an ebook and the problem is not related to your password, please look at the guidelines above, depending upon the device which you are using. You could also try using a different web browser, or clearing your search history/cache. If you are receiving error messages when trying to access the ebooks, please send an email to library.technical@beds.ac.uk. It would be helpful if you could include a screenshot of the error message which you are getting on screen.

Why can’t the library get every book electronically?

You may wonder why some books are in the library electronically while others are not.

Library ebooks have to have special licences – they are different to the ones you can buy for your own personal use.

Certain publishers only make ebooks available to libraries through highly expensive or restrictive licencing models, while others do not make electronic versions of their books available for library purchase at all.

The academic community is coming together to negotiate better terms for ebook publishing. For more information see Jisc's Joint statement on access to ebook and e-textbook content and the #ebookSOS campaign website and video