E-Books

How do I find e-books?

The University of Chicago Library provides access to thousands of online books through our subscription databases. The majority of these books are cataloged, and can be accessed via the Library Catalog or Lens.

Major E-Book Databases - Historical Collections - Google Book Search - Additional E-Book Collections

Major E-Book Databases

Interdisciplinary collections of e-books, many directly from the publisher. Please note that the Library may not subscribe to all of the e-books within these collections.

NetLibrary
Provides full-text access to books on business, consumer health and medicine, computers, and information technology purchased by the library or provided by the Illinois Digital Academic Library. Also includes over 4,000 public-domain eBooks.
Oxford Scholarship Online
Provides full-text access to selected books in philosophy, religion, economics and finance, and political science published by Oxford University Press. Currently includes over 700 titles, and 200 titles will be added annually.
Safari Tech Books Online
Full-text electronic versions of a broad range of technical, computer software and programming books. Browse by categories such as applied sciences, hardware, and programming etc. Search specific book by author, ISBN, title or publisher.
Springer E-Books
Provides full-text for several thousand electronic books in a wide variety of subjects published by Springer. E-book coverage generally begins in 2005, though some book series are online from 1997 to the present.

Historical Collections

Full-text databases providing access to major microfilm collections of books, most from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

Early English Books Online
Titles from Pollard & Redgrave (1475-1640), Wing (1641-1700), Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) and Early English Books Tract Supplement. Subjects include literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, theology, music, art, education, mathematics, and science.
Eighteenth-Century Collections Online
Comprehensive digital edition of The Eighteenth Century, a microfilm collection of 150,000 English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800. Includes books and broadsides, Bibles, tract books and sermons to printed ephemera by well-known and lesser-known eighteenth-century authors.
Eighteenth-Century Fiction
The Eighteenth-Century Fiction database contains works in English prose from the period 1700 to 1780, by writers from the British Isles. Each text is reproduced in full, including all prefatory matter and annotation by the original author.
Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800
Digital version of the microfilm collection, Early American Imprints Series I. The collection provides full-text of books published in America in the 17th and 18th centuries, covering topics from agriculture and auctions through foreign affairs, diplomacy, literature, music, religion, the Revolutionary War, temperance, and witchcraft.
Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819
Digital version of the microfilm collection, Early American Imprints Series II (1801-1819). The collection provides full-text access to American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the first nineteen years of the nineteenth century.
Making of the Modern World
Full-text version of the Goldsmith-Kress microfilm collection, a comprehensive collection of economics and business literature dating from the last half of the 15th century to the early 20th century. The collection presents more than 61,000 books from the period 1460-1850, and 466 pre-1906 serials. The collection focuses on economics interpreted in the widest sense, including political science, history, sociology, and special collections on banking, finance, transportation and manufacturing.

Google Book Search

The Google Book Search is an extensive e-book project that will eventually scan millions of books from the collections of major research libraries (including the University of Chicago).

Google Book Search
Google book search provides full-text access to books which are out of copyright (generally, books published before 1930) and "snippets" of some books in copyright. You can limit your search to full-text only or search the complete collection.

Additional E-Book Collections

The University of Chicago Library provides access to hundreds of smaller e-book collections covering subjects as divergent as medical textbooks to fiction by Italian women writers. To locate these collections, we recommend the following web sites: