e‑books in Utrecht University Library
The library aims at making information available, as much and as easily as possible. In addition to a large number of journals, many reference works and text publications have been available online for a long time now. And also e‑books are increasingly acquired.
On this page we will keep you informed about the latest developments.
The most important e‑books packages
(Access only within Utrecht University, unless indicated otherwise)
- AccessMedicine (McGraw-Hill)
> 60 reference works and books in the field of medicine.
- Cambridge Histories Online
> 270 historical reference works, especially in the humanities.
- Cambridge University Press e‑books
Some 350 e‑books in all disciplines.
NEW
In 2013 you also have access to over 13,000 of the other e-books from this publisher. At the end of the year the most relevant and highly used titles will be selected for permanent access.
- CogNet MIT-Press
> 530 books about brain research and cognition.
- Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren
> 5,700 books from Dutch literature (many older titles), free access.
- Digi20 NEW
Ca. 4.700 digitized monographs, mainly in German and predominantly in the field of humanities and social sciences. Free access.
The titles were published origninally by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Wilhelm Fink / Ferdinand Schöningh as well as Otto Sagner, from the 1950s to the present. Most titles date from 1990-2010.
- Digitale bijzondere collecties Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht
> 2,800 scanned titles from Utrecht collections, all disciplines, many older publications, also non-books, free access.
- EBL (Electronic Book Library)
> 2,400 separately ordered e‑books from various publishers, all disciplines.
- Early English Books Online (EEBO)
> 128,000 English titles from the period 1400-1700.
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
> 138,000 English titles from the period 1700-1800.
- Google Books
> 1,000,000 books with “full view”, all disciplines, especially older titles, free access; use Advanced search to limit to just books with full view.
- InTech Open
> 300 Open Access books in science and medicine, free access.
- OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks)
> 700 publications from European universities, free access.
- OECD iLibrary
> 6,000 reports in the fields of economics, national accounts, environment, energy, idustry, science and innovation and urban and rural development (selection from OECD publications).
- Oxford Scholarship Online
Ca. 500 titles (package with updates May 2010 - January 2011 in the fields of humanities, economics, law and politics).
- Palgrave Connect
Over 500 e-books in various fields (the emphasis is on social science, economics and geography). These titles are not yet in our catalogue.
- ScienceDirect e‑books (Elsevier)
> 1,500 titles, all disciplines, especially science, medicine and engineering. Some 1100 books are available permanently and about 400 2011 titles will be available until the end of 2012; the most used of those will remain available permanently after 2012.
- SpringerLink
> 27,000 titles from all disciplines, 2005-2012 (excluding publications by Bohn Stafleu van Loghum and also excluding books in German). The 2012 titles will soon be included in the catalogue and Omega.
N.B. Springer also offers members of the Utrecht University community black & white softcover print copies of its books against reduced price of € 24,95 in the so called MyCopy programme.
- Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
(Please note that you must check the box Full Access Content Only at the bottom of the page)
> 1000 titles, mainly from Routledge, mainly covering the publication years 2009-2011 and for the greatest part in the disciplines of Social Sciences and Geosciences.
Please note: unfortunately for some of these books there is a maximum of 5 concurrent UU-users because of DRM (digital rights management).
In some cases you also need to install a plug-in for Acrobat Reader. This add-on has not yet been installed on university computers, causing these books to be unusable there.
- Wiley (& Blackwell)
Some 12,000 e-books from Wiley and Blackwell. Most books are from 2000 onwards, but there are also some 2000 older titles. All titles will be added to our catalogue in due time. At the end of 2013 we will select some 700 titles to keep indefinitely, based on usage and relevance.
Old and new publications
More old than new books are electronically available via Google Books, but also packages such as EEBO and ECCO contain hundreds of thousands of freely accessible older e‑books. This is because new books are often copyrighted and therefore more expensive. Nevertheless, we currently have almost 40,000 modern e‑books in our collection.
If it turns out that e‑books are appreciated by students and staff, buying e‑books will be preferable to buying print books.
For your information, you may request the library to scan publications from its own collection which bear no copyright and make them electronically available.
Searching for and within e‑books
Catalogue and OmegaMost e‑books from Oxford, Elsevier and Springer are included in the library
catalogue and
Omega. You can search by title and author. Using
Advanced search you can limit your search to e‑books only.
The library is working on indexing words from the chapter titles and tables of content. Links in the catalogue and Omega can be used off-campus as well.
The classification of e‑books in our collections (catalogue) and subjects (Omega) is rather crude and should be used only as a last option when searching for e‑books.
Electronic databasesAnother way to sites and databases with full text books is using the e‑books filter in our
list of databases. When using the UBU-link, you may encounter links to e‑books. However, this is not working for all our e‑books packages yet and that means that if the UBU-link does not give you the e‑book option, the best thing to do is to search for the title in the catalogue or Omega.
Google BooksMost e‑books can be found in Google Books, with the exception of the books published by Oxford.
Usually, you will get a direct link from Google Books to the site of the publisher. This will often give you access to the full text within Utrecht University, but not always, for instance in the case of books acquired from EBL.
In Google Scholar you cannot perform a specific search for e‑books, but you may find them in the list of results.
Besides Google Books,
searching full text within a book is also possible on all websites of the packages mentioned above.
Printing and downloading
With most e‑books it is possible to print and download chapters. But to all packages the rule applies that downloading and re-using (please check the
copyright information point) on a grand scale is not allowed.
Some suppliers and publishers have very strict limitations:
Access to e‑books
Within the university, most e‑books are available to Utrecht University students and staff, and to visitors who have a so-called
Solis ID.
N.B. e‑books from
EBL (Ebook Library) are only accessible to Utrecht University staff and students.
File types and use on e-readers
Most e‑books are available in PDF format, which is also used for most journal articles. Use on desktop computers, laptops and netbooks will present no problems.
However, use on smartphones, tablets and e-readers may present problems, because not all file formats can be used. Due to the fact that for the time being most publishers and suppliers will make use of the PDF format we advise you to check if your mobile device can handle that format.
We will examine the various possibilities in the near future and will keep you informed of the latest developments.
Purchase suggestions?
There are e‑books available in all disciplines. In some packages science is better represented (Elsevier, Springer), other ones are more focused on humanities.
If you have any purchase suggestions for e‑books or e‑book packages, please contact your
subject specialist.