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Ebook Central

Searching in Ebook Central

It’s easy to begin a new search from wherever you are in Ebook Central. Just look for the Search box at the top of the page, or the Search link in the global navigation.

The image above shows an example of search results.

The keyword is highlighted in the search results, and there’s a short description to give you a bit more information about the book, including whether it is currently "Available," "Available on request," or "In use."

You can refine your searching by using search filters such as Year Published, Subject, Language, and Author.

Download the book, read it online, see the Table of Contents and more, and add the book to your bookshelf. Chapter Results provide the top chapters from the most relevant books

Browse Subjects

Not sure what you're looking for? Just curious about the titles available for a particular subject? Ebook Central allows you to easily browse by subject.

Major Subject Areas:

  • Arts
  • Business
  • Education
  • General
  • Health & Medicine
  • History & Political Science
  • Law
  • Literature & Language
  • Religion & Philosophy
  • Social Science
  • Science & Technology

Creating an Account With Ebrary

Ebrary provides thousands of ebooks, when you access an ebrary ebook you will be prompted to create an account before you can download a book. When you create an account you can use any e-mail address you choose, since this is a national company you may not get your first choice of username. Don't forget to check the box agreeing to the terms of service before you can continue.

An account lets you:

  • Download ebooks to your device
  • Annotate a text through highlighting
  • Access any book you've looked at or highlighted through your own Bookshelf tab

Looking at a Specific Title

When you click on a book title either in Ebrary or through the JDH Library Catalog you will be looking at the "Quickview" tab. From this page you can either download the entire book in EPUB format, navigate and browse the book on screen by clicking into the table of contents, or use the InfoTools toolbar. Clicking the arrows will turn the page. The +/- icon allows you to zoom in and out.

The InfoTools toolbar allows you to search the web for definitions of highlighted words, as well as use popular map websites to inform your reading. To highlight a word either click on it, or drag your mouse across a passage. The print function is limited to 60 pages of each book.

Annotating a Text

To annotate a text, drag your mouse across a passage, then click the icon with the yellow highlighter to save your note. The annotations will be added to your bookshelf and are searchable.

Downloading a book

There are two options for downloading books. You can either download the entire book as an EPUB file or download a chapter or page number portion as a PDF file.

Downloading an entire book

To download an entire ebrary document onto your computer, thereby creating an e-book for temporary access, you need Adobe Digital Editions, a free software program.

You can read and annotate downloaded e-books offline on your computer, and transfer them to supported devices.  You can have up to 10 ebrary e-books downloaded at a time, each checkout is 14 days. After the 14 days your item will automatically expire. You can also return a book early if you want to be able to download more materials. Ebrary may take up to an hour to recognize that materials have been returned.

If it’s your first time downloading a document onto your computer via Adobe Digital Editions:

We recommend setting up Adobe Digital Editions on your computer before you start downloading from ebrary, see:  http://support.ebrary.com/?p=841 if on a personal computer. All UWS computers have Adobe Digital Editions already downloaded.

Or you can do all the steps together:

  1. If you aren’t already, sign in to your personal ebrary account
    That is, click the “Sign In” button at the top right and sign in as usual.
  2. Click the “Download“ button in list mode or while viewing the document
  3. Select option to “Download the entire document“, Click OK
  4. If you haven’t already done so, you’ll be prompted to install Adobe Digital Editions
  5. Once Adobe Digital Editions is installed, choose Open with Adobe Digital Editions
  6. You’ll be prompted to sign in to your Adobe account; if you don’t already have one, click the button to create one

That’s it!

Limitations on full-document downloading:

  • Some publishers prohibit full-document downloading of their documents
    For a list of these publishers, see: http://support.ebrary.com/?p=868
  • Downloaded ebooks are not supported on Kindle unless you use the PDF of a specific section
  • Full-document downloading is currently not available on Linux

Downloading a PDF File

Create an image PDF of a specific chapter or page range for any ebrary document (up to 60 pages).

You can then read the image PDF file offline on your computer using any standard PDF viewer, such as Adobe Reader, which you probably already have. All campus computers already have Adobe Reader.  You can also transfer the file to a mobile device or e-reader, including the Kindle.

  • Image PDF files don’t expire.
  • You cannot search text or make annotations in an image PDF.

To create an image PDF of a specific chapter:

  1. Click the Download button in ebrary search results or QuickView window. You may be prompted to sign in to your ebrary bookshelf account.
    (If you don’t already have one, create one as described here
    http://support.ebrary.com/kb/to-create-ebrary-account)
  2. Select the option to create an image PDF of a chapter, then choose the name of the chapter from the drop-down menu
    - Nested chapters and subchapters cannot be selected; only the book’s top-level (left-most) nesting
    - If the chapter is longer than the number of pages allowed to be printed, you will get an error message
  3. Click OK

Subjects

On the home screen of Ebrary you can opt to browse by topic. Simpy select a broad category such as "History" and all of the books in that category will load. You can then narrow your search down even further using the checkboxes given or by adding in additional keywords to your search. Ebrary contains books on:

  • Business & Economics
  • Computers & IT
  • Education
  • Engineering & Technology
  • History & Political Science
  • Humanities
  • Interdisciplinary & Area Studies
  • Language, Literature & Linguistics
  • Law, International Relations & Public Policy
  • Life Sciences
  • Medical
  • Nursing & Allied Health
  • Physical Sciences
  • Psychology & Social Work
  • Religion, Philosophy & Classics
  • Sociology & Anthropology

More help with Ebrary