Guides: E-books at Penn: Overview

What is an E-book

An e-book, electronic book, or digital book, is defined by The Oxford English Dictionary as a book whose text is available in electronic format for reading on a specialized device or computer screen.

Questions? Contact:

Rebecca Stuhr
Director for Academic Engagement
Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center
stuhrreb@pobox.upenn.edu

Introduction

Rendering of books coming out of screen of laptop

This page is intended to lead you to and guide you
through the use of e-books at the University of Pennsylvania.

Highly Recommended

Books@OVID
This is a collection of clinical textbooks and manuals for medicine and nursing, fully cross-searchable, and with links from bibliographies to articles in external databases such as PubMed.
Cambridge Core Collection
Collection of over 900 e-books from across the disciplines published by Cambridge University Press. Try also the related collection of e-books, Cambridge Companions online—http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017/84298
De Gruyter
Publishes over 1300 books each year in the humanities, social sciences, medicine, mathematics, engineering, computer sciences, natural sciences, and law.
e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection
This collection of e-books from Duke University Press includes 100 newly published books as well as hundreds of earlier imprints. Every title is searchable in Franklin or from the e-Duke site.
EBSCOhost Ebooks
Provides the full-text of thousands recently-published books from selected academic and commercial publishers, as well as the full-text of a large number of older works in the public domain.
Elsevier ScienceDirect Books
Web database for scientific research that contains abstracts, articles and full text of Elsevier Science journals in the life, physical, medical, technical, and social sciences. Contains abstracts from the core journals in major scientific disciplines.
IGI Global Online
Over 5,300 reference books in a number of different fields.
ITER: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Contains electronic resources for researchers in the study and teaching of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400-1700). Enables users to access citations in journal, book, and reviews databases
O'Reilly for Higher Education
Penn Libraries subscribes to the O'Reilly digital platform, which includes books and videos on technology, digital media, and business.
Oxford Scholarly Editions Online
Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) is a major new publishing initiative from Oxford University Press, providing an interlinked collection of authoritative Oxford editions of major works from the humanities.
Oxford Scholarship Online
Cross-searchable library containing the full text and abstracts of classic and newly published Oxford books in a number of scholarly disciplines.
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Scholarship includes: anthropology; archaeology; biology; business and management; classical studies; economics and finance; film, television and radio; history; law; linguistics; literature; mathematics; music; neuroscience; palliative care; philosophy; physics; political science; psychology; public health and epidemiology; religion; social work; society and culture; and sociology.
ProQuest Ebook Central
Multidisciplinary e-book library with over 1 million books from over 750 publishers.
SAGE Knowledge
A database of ebooks and reference books published by SAGE covering the social sciences and education. The SAGE Knowledge platform hosts 2,700 titles and includes scholarly monographs, reference works, handbooks, series, professional development titles, and more.
Translated Texts for Historians
Fully searchable scholarly translations from Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Georgian and Armenian of texts published between 300 and 800 AD; from late antiquity to the early middle ages.
World Bank E-Library
Fulltext PDF-format collection of more than 1,200 World Bank books, including all new titles and selected titles beginning in 1984. Topics covered include:agriculture, education, environment, finance, globalization, governance, health and population, industry, infrastructure, international economics, labor and employment, macroeconomics and growth, poverty, private sector development, public sector management, rural development, social development, transition economies, urban development.

Linking to e-books @ Penn

A Sample of E-book Collections @ Penn
Links to major collections such as Early English Books Online, African Writers, and the complete works of William Shakespeare. Follow the link at the bottom of the page to find even more e-books @ penn. This page is continuously updated.
Digital Penn
Digital collections and projects feature unique, primary-source materials for teaching, research, and discovery drawn from the Penn Libraries' signature collections or from our collaborations with the Penn community and with cultural heritage institutions. It provides access to important rare books, manuscripts, photographs and multimedia sources represented by images, texts, audio files, bibliographic databases, catalogs, and archival finding aids for the study of a wide array of subjects.
DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books
The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books from academic publishers.
HathiTrust Digital Library
University of Pennsylvania is a HathiTrust partner, which is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. Books published before 1923 are fully searchable and viewable. Books published after 1923 are searchable but not viewable.
Metropolitan Museum of Art Publications Full-Text Online
The Met has released over 500 of their publications as freely availably Open Access texts.
Online Books Page
Links to open access, freely available online texts
Penn Collections at the Internet Archive
The Penn libraries have digitized 1,027 volumes gathered into eight collections and accessible through the Internet Archive.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg offers over 40,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.
SAGE Knowledge
A database of ebooks and reference books published by SAGE covering the social sciences and education. The SAGE Knowledge platform hosts 2,700 titles and includes scholarly monographs, reference works, handbooks, series, professional development titles, and more.
University of California Press E-books 1982-2004
700 open access titles are included in this collection of University Press books on art, science, history, music, religion, and fiction.