Electronic books (ebooks)

Increasingly, publishers are producing books in digital format either instead of, or as well as the printed edition. The university subscribes to thousands electronic books (ebooks). ProQuest Ebook Central and VLEbooks are the University's main suppliers of ebooks and contains many of the key texts on your reading lists, although we also have a collection through EBSCO ebooks (formerly called NetLibrary), the reference collection Credo Reference access to Open Access ebooks via OAPEN and DOAB

Staff and students have access to these collections both within the University and from home; use your university username and password to log in. (See our help page on services from home.) Our ebooks can be viewed online for as long as you like, but, as with printed books, there are limitations on how much you can print from them. ProQuest Ebook Central and VLEbooks titles can be downloaded for up to three days. Some titles have limits on the number of people who can view each title at any one time. EBSCO ebooks can only be read by one person at a time.

Our ebooks are all listed in our catalogue in the same way as the printed books. You can access them by doing a search on the library catalogue just like a "normal" book. To search for ebooks alone, go to the catalogue advanced search page and set "material type" to "ebooks".

Ebooks have the advantage that you can search across the whole text of every book in the main textbook collections for information on your topic, rather than having to rely on what is in the catalogue record, which often doesn't list contents. To see a full list of ebook packages select the Digital Library tab from the home page of the library catalogue, then select the menu entitled "Ebook collections".

ProQuest Ebook Central and VLEbooks provide access to thousands of ebooks in a variety of subjects. All titles are linked on the library catalogue and DISCOVER

EBSCO ebook collection There are thousands publicly accessible e-books and approximately 340 to which the University of Bedfordshire has a subscription. The subject and content of these e-books reflect the full range of disciplines taught and researched at the University of Bedfordshire. All titles are linked on the library catalogue

We also have some ebooks direct from publishers, these can be found in the library catalogue

Business Source Premier and SocIndex are primarily databases of journal articles but also contain the full text of some books. If you wish to retrieve only books from your search then select 'books' from the 'Publication Type' menu.

Credo Reference is a digital library of reference books covering a wide range of subjects. You can search the whole database or just a group of titles. It could be the ideal source when you want to check a fact, define a theory or retrieve a good quotation for a presentation.

OAPEN and DOAB are collections of ebooks that have been published as Open Access, which means that they are freely available for anyone to read.