Electronic Books


General Engineering & Technology Literature and Reference Classics (Greek and Roman)	History Philosophy E-books in UCAT

Electronic books, or e-books, are increasingly common on the Web. Many titles are in the public domain, which means that the original copyright has expired. Always check the conditions of use or copyright statements on e-book sites. It is never a good idea to assume that online texts, whether or not they are in the public domain, can be republished or copied without permission from the site owner, who may have copyrighted the particular presentation of these texts. There are also sites for which subscriptions are necessary to access copyrighted works. These sites usually restrict the degree to which one can print or download e-books. UTSA subscribes to several of these sites.

General

Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL) (UTSA subscription)
(via GaleNet) Contains the full text of 650 encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources in a variety of disciplines. Updated regularly. Subscribed titles

netLibrary (UTSA subscription)
Offers a comprehensive collection of electronic books (e-books) including thousands of scholarly, reference, and professional e-books on all subjects from leading university, academic, and professional publishers. You can browse netLibrary e-books for quick research and reference or check them out and read them at your leisure, and there is a link to reference books arranged by subject. Checking out books requires setting up a free netLibrary account. Since e-books are online, you don't have to worry about returning them. E-books are automatically "returned" at the end of your check-out period. Updated frequently.

Project Gutenberg
Free Website: http://www.gutenberg.net/index.shtml
Books in the public domain, with an emphasis on classics. Since anyone can volunteer to provide the electronic version of a book in the public domain, there are also some eclectic, rare titles, as well. Books are in plain text format and can be viewed online or downloaded.

Making of America
Free Website: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/
This collection currently contains approximately 10,000 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints. Focus is in education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. Books and articles can be viewed in plain text or .pdf formats, or as images. Note: adding titles to the bookbag will allow you to email or save citations only.

CQ Electronic Library (UTSA Subscription)
Provides access to reference resources on topics in American government, politics, history, public policy, and current affairs. Includes the CQ Congress, Public Affairs, Voting and Elections, and Supreme Court collections, as well as Encyclopedia of American Government. Also includes CQ Political Reference Suite titles: Congress and the Nation, Political Handbook of the World, Historic Documents Series, Washington Information Directory, and Politics in America. Collections may contain dictionary or encyclopedia entries, image galleries, and maps in addition to full text. Full Text/Full Image

Google Book Search
Free Website: http://books.google.com/
View the entirety of books in the public domain and portions of books that are copyrighted. Includes links to library holdings.

Internet Archive -- Text Archive
Free Website: http://www.archive.org/details/texts
View the entirety of books in the public domain.

Engineering & Technology

ENGnetBASE (UTSA subscription)
Provides full-text access to hundreds of leading engineering handbooks in PDF format published by CRC Press. Also searchable from Engineering Village 2. Updated monthly. Note: In order to view entire e-books, Adobe Acrobat must be set to open PDF files within your browser.

Referex Engineering (UTSA subscription)
(via Engineering Village 2) Provides PDF full-text access to over 300 leading engineering monographs in three collections: Chemical, Petrochemical, & Process Engineering; Mechanical & Materials Engineering; and Electronics & Electrical Engineering. Updated frequently. Title list

Safari Tech Books (UTSA subscription)
(via ProQuest) Provides access to the full text of over 1,300 computer science and information technology books published by Cisco, Macromedia, Microsoft, O'Reilly, SAMS, and others during the past three years. Updated twice per week.

Literature and Reference

ClassicReader.com
Free Website: http://www.classicreader.com/
large collection of free classic stories in the public domain by authors such as Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare and many others. A selection of author biographies and portraits are also available. All functions of this site are free to use although some functions, such as downloading, require free registration. The collection currently contains over 2,300 works of literature.

Early English Books Online (UTSA subscription)
Offers full-image access to more than 125,000 literary and historical works published in Great Britain and Ireland from 1475 to 1700. Included are titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue of printed materials published in the English language from 1475 to 1640; Wing's Short-Title Catalogue of works dating from 1641 to 1700; and Thomason Tracts, a compendium of broadsides on the English Civil War printed between 1640 and 1661. Also included are high-resolution images of original works by authors such as Malory, Spenser, Bacon, More, Erasmus, Boyle, Newton, Galileo, Purcell, Shakespeare, and Behn. Included are books, tracts, pamphlets, proclamations, almanacs, and calendars of interest to those researching history, literature, and the humanities.

Bartleby.com
Free Website: http://www.bartleby.com/
Access to writings by prominent American literary authors, such as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, and reference materials, such as The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, and The Columbia Encyclopedia. Books can be browsed online in HTML format.

Making of America
Free Website: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/
This collection currently contains approximately 8,500 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints. Focus is in education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. Books and articles can be viewed in plain text or .pdf formats, or as images. Note: adding titles to the bookbag will allow you to email or save citations only.

Page by Page Books
Free Website: http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/
Hundreds of classic works of literature, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Books are in HTML format with chapter breaks and easy-to-use navigation buttons.

Classics (Greek and Roman)

Bartleby.com
Free Website: http://www.bartleby.com/
Access to Classics, such as Oxford Latin Verse, Aeschylus, and Bulfinch's Mythology. Books can be browsed online in HTML format.

Bulfinch's Mythology
Free Website: http://www.bulfinch.org/
Complete access to all three volumes of Bulfinch's Mythology: The Age of Fable, The Age of Chivalry, and the Legends of Charlemagne. Texts are arranged by chapter and can be viewed and searched online. There are numerous images, as well.

Perseus Project
Free Website: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cache/perscoll_Greco-Roman.html
A large collection of works by Greek and Roman authors in the original language and in translation. Works are in plain text with hyperlinks to other useful information. Works can be read online only.

History

ACLS History E-Book Project(UTSA subscription)
Produced by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the History E-Book Project provides full-text access to hundreds of major works in American, European, and Middle Eastern history, as well as the history of technology. Works included are published by university presses, societies that constitute ACLS, and commercial, scholarly publishing houses. The works selected for inclusion in this resource are deemed to have lasting value to research in the discipline and are frequently cited by historians. Nearly 350 new titles will be added every year, with almost 100 of those titles being newly published works. Dates of coverage vary. Updated annually.

Philosophy

Philosophy on the Web/Past Masters(UTSA subscription)
Provides full-text access to major works of classical and modern philosophy, including those by Aquinas, Aristotle, John Dewey, Kant, Martin Luther, Ockham, Santayana, and Wittgenstein, among many others. Includes works of political and religious thought by individual authors, as well as works representative of philosophical movements pertaining to time periods and geographic regions (e.g., British philosophy, 1600-1900). Works are presented in their original language or in translation; non-English-language works may be translated roughly into English by using the "Tools--Translate" feature. Dates of coverage and update frequency vary.

E-books in UCAT

You can find many e-books that UTSA owns in UCAT, the library's catalog. To limit your search to e-books: choose the expert keyword search option and search for "netlibrary".
This will retrieve all e-book titles included in UCAT. You can also combine other keywords with netLibrary; for example, a search for dickens and netlibrary will retrieve all e-books with the word or name dickens in the description. (Most of the results will be books by Charles Dickens or literary criticism of Charles Dickens' work.) Since not all e-books are catalogued in UCAT, you may want to search netLibrary directly.

To view e-books found in UCAT, click the title of the e-book in your list of results, and then click the link provided under "Internet Access." The link will take you directly to the full-text of the e-book if you are on a campus computer.

If you are off-campus, you will have to log-in to netLibrary to view the e-book. If you do not have a netLibrary username/password, go to "Databases A-Z" on the library's homepage and choose netLibrary. After logging in with your UTSA Banner ID, you can then create a free netLibrary account. Creating a netLibrary account will allow you to check out e-books and utilize special features, such as creating a favorites list.

updated 11/01/05 ddz ; 3/4/08 rev.