Electronic Books

If you are searching for books on the Internet, there are a number of portal sites that serve as gateways to finding titles online.

The On-Line Books Page, maintained by the University of Pennsylvania Digital Library Project. The site includes a searchable list of over 19,000 books available on the World Wide Web.
Project Gutenberg, the oldest and largest project to make the full-text of older books available online.
IPL Books Collection from the Internet Public Library. You can search or browse over 20,000 titles by author, title, or Dewey Category.
Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia is an online archive over 45,000 humanities texts in a dozen languages.
Google Book Search has some online books.

Note that only materials that are not copyrighted or who's copyright has expired are in the public domain and therefore freely-available. See below for information on accessing some copyrighted books online.

NetLibrary is a collection of ebooks. It offers the content of thousands of books in an electronic format. No reading device is required to view the books. You can read online from a computer screen one page at a time.

NetLibrary is made up of three parts. The Public Collection is created from free ebooks available to anyone. The Private Collection consists of recently published titles protected by copyright law. UWM Custom Collection was built from the titles in the Private Collection but represents only a portion of it. Only UWM-affiliated users have access to the UWM Custom Collection.

The Public Collection consists of 4000 books that are in the public domain, mostly older titles, such as "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens or "Common Sense" by Thomas Paine. Anyone can access books in the Public Collection. They don't need to be checked out and there is no limitation on how many users read them at the same time.
UWM Custom Collection consists of over 1900 books on a wide variety of scholarly subjects published by major academic publishers in recent years. The titles are protected by copyright law. They can only be checked out to one library user at a time.

You can access ebooks in the UWM Custom Collection in a variety of ways. You can preview the table of contents and full-text for 15 minutes without logging in and checking the book out. If you decide that you want to read a book for a longer time, you have to check it out. Check out is a digital equivalent of borrowing a book from the library. To check out an ebook, you need to create a netLibrary account. You must create the account from a UWM campus computer or from off-campus via a UWM computer account (more information). Once you have created your account, you can access netLibrary from anywhere. When you check out an ebook from netLibrary, it is reserved for you for 24 hours. The checkout period is displayed on the checkout status page. It expires automatically after 24 hours. If you are done reading the book before that time, please remember to check the book in, so other UWM users can have access to it. After checking out a book, you can read it online.

Some library databases also conain electronic texts:

ACLS Humanities E-Book [formerly ACLS History E-Book Project]: Dates vary; over 1,000 books in most humanities disciplines. You can only read or print online from a computer screen one page at a time.
Black Drama: 1850-present; over 1,200 plays, with information on related authors, productions and theaters. Guide
British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries: Dates vary; diaries, letters and other personal writings of women, with biographical information and annotated source bibliographies. Guide
Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment: 1534-1850; Full text documents on the relationships among peoples and the environment in North America.
Early English Books Online: Over 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640), Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700), and the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661). Guide
Knovel Scientific and Engineering Online References: Dates vary; a collection of over 600 handbooks, dictionaries and proceedings in technical disciplines. Full text is searchable by keywords and numeric property values. Contains interactive tables, graphs, and equations. Data from tables can be manipulated and further imported in an Excel spreadsheet. Field Guide | Guide
North American Women's Letters and Diaries: Colonial-1950; 150,000 pages of diaries and letters from over 600 women. Guide
Safari Books Online: Dates vary; Full text of books from technology publishers.
Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period: Dates vary; 60 volumes of romantic poetry and contemporary critical reviews. Guide
Women and Social Movements: 1600-2000; Original documents and historical analysis pertaining to Women and Social Movements.

Licensed electronic books from these databases are also included in the library catalog.

For more information on electronic books, contact the Information Desk at 414-229-4659 or email Ask A Librarian.