We have a large collection of ebooks which are available for staff and students of the University. They are available via a number of platforms, so ebooks don’t all look the same. In order to use ebooks, you may need to use software such as Adobe Reader or install a plugin via your browser.

We are also investing in patron-driven acquisition, whereby potentially useful titles are loaded into the library catalogue and only paid for if they are used. You won’t know if you are buying a new ebook or accessing one of our existing titles – what matters is that you have information delivered to your desktop when you need it.

You can search within each of these collections by using the links on this page. However, you can also use Discovery or our Library Catalogue to search for individual ebooks, both by known author and/or title details and by keyword. Both of these give you the option to do a search and then narrow the results down by selecting just ebooks.

Please note that there can be a short delay before newly purchased ebooks appear on the library catalogue; if you find one that says it is ‘on order’, you should be able to find it by looking directly in Ebook Central.

Major eBook Collections

The Library subscribes to the Ebook Central ebooks service (formerly known as ebrary), which gives us access to more than 300,000 titles. These are available from anywhere using your University account. Users can highlight text, make notes, create bookshelves, link to definitions and contextual material, and copy or print text. You can do all this using the QuickView reader, which requires no special software plugins.

Browser specifications

Ebook Central works best with any modern browser. In all cases you must have Java Scripting enabled.

AOL users should turn off all browser add-ons (including the AOL toolbar). If this does not work, try using another browser.

Ebook Central Online Help

Ebook Central provides an online help section. If you can't find what you need, contact the Library for help.

Accessibility features

In QuickView (the default reader), you can access Accessibility mode, which converts all Ebook Central books to plain text so you can use a screen reader.

For text-to-speech functionality and a 2-page view, you can install the Ebook Central Unity Reader. You should use Windows or Mac OSX for this, as it does not work well with the Linux operating system. Instructions for installing the Unity reader are in the Ebook Central help section.

 

Resources

  • Ebook Central
    (Searchable in EBSCO Discovery)

    Access around 200,000 ebooks across all subject areas.

  • Ebsco eBook collection
    (Searchable in EBSCO Discovery)

    Access to the Sports Medicine, Physical Therapy & Education 2012 e-book collection.

Additional eBook Resources

  • Cambridge Companions to Literature and Classics

    Access thousands of chapters on major authors, periods and genres, written by experts and designed for student readers.

  • Early English Books Online (EEBO)
    (Searchable in EBSCO Discovery)

    No other resource for early modern scholarship is as comprehensive as Early English Books Online (EEBO) with over 146,600 titles and associated bibliographic records. Users can explore complete, digitized images of all the works listed in the key bibliographic records of English literature: The Short-Title Catalogue (Pollard & Redgrave, 1475-1640); The Short-Title Catalogue II (Wing, 1641-1700); The Thomason Tracts; and the Early English Books Tract Supplements, as well as original almanacs, pamphlets, musical scores, prayer books and other primary sources.

  • Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)

    ECCO is a searchable corpus of books, pamphlets and broadsides in all subjects printed between 1701 and 1800. It currently contains over 180,000 titles with over 32 million fully-searchable pages. It is a digitization of the 18th century section of the works catalogued in the English Short-title Catalogue (ESTC). The ESTC project has been recording all works published or printed in Britain, Ireland, territories under British colonial rule, and the United States. It also catalogues material printed elsewhere which contains significant text in English, Welsh, Irish or Gaelic, as well as any book falsely claiming to have been printed in Britain or its territories.

  • Higher Education from Cambridge University Press

    Access over 1000 Cambridge e-textbooks across most subjects. Register for a free personal account to use features such as notes and bookmarking. Watch these short videos to learn more. 

  • Oxford Handbooks Online
    (Searchable in EBSCO Discovery)

    Each Oxford Handbook offers an authoritative and state-of-the-art survey of current thinking and research. Specially commissioned essays from leading international figures in the discipline give critical examination of the progress and direction of debates, providing researchers and students with compelling new perspectives.

  • Routledge Handbooks Online

    Over 250 unlimited access in-depth guides to current and classic research across a range of subject areas. If you can't access something via this site, put the book title into our general Portsmouth catalogue as we have some titles via Ebook Central instead.

  • SAGE Catalyst
    (Searchable in EBSCO Discovery)

    A collection of over 500 full-text social science textbooks from SAGE.