University of Kent

E-book collections

Most of these e-book collections allow you to keyword search across all the titles within the collection.

Individual e-book titles are best accessed via the Library catalogue; to limit your search, select Advanced search, limit to ‘e-book’ under Collection and then enter your search terms.

Library subscribed services

• Academic Library: over 500 titles including politics, culture and media. Plus the Electric Book Literature Collection, which includes classics from Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and many more.
• ACLS Humanities E book project: over 1500 titles with 200+ added each year.
• Cambridge Collections Online: includes access to:
  • Cambridge Companions Complete Collection: accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics and periods
  • Cambridge Companions to Literature and Classics
  • Cambridge Companions to Philosophy, Religion and Culture
• Dawsonera: full access to over 700 titles on this service.
• EBL (Ebook Library): a steadily growing collection of ebooks from all subject areas. EBL is also available via Shibboleth
• ECCO - Eighteenth Century Collections Online: nearly 150,000 titles and editions published in English between 1701 and 1800
• EEBO - Early English Books Online: almost all works in English printed from 1473-1700.
• HeinOnline: large legal research collection containing more than nine centuries of legal history
• Lecture Notes in Computer Science: book series from Springer. 1973-present, over 7000 volumes
• Literature Online: 350,000 literary texts together with journals, author biographies and other critical and reference resources
• MyiLibrary: we have over 170 subscription titles on this e-book service. It also has links to other related free services
• Oxford Handbooks Online: Political Science: a thorough introduction to political science topics, delivered via specially commissioned essays with extensive referencing to further reading.
• Oxford Scholarship Online: over 1400 current books (the economics and finance, law, philosophy, political science, and religion modules) from OUP.

Freely available resources

• Electronic Literature Directory: directory of electronic works (including current texts) covering poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction. Lists titles, authors, and publishing organisations, with links pointing you to the full-text (wherever it may be!)
• Free books: another directory of the different free e-book services available.
• Globusz Publishing: free electronic books in areas of non-fiction (business, computing, economics, philosophy, etc.), and fiction (classics, poetry, drama, and new releases). Can download and read books online for free, but they expire after a certain period: lifetime membership rates are available
• Internet Archive - Text archive: contains over 1.3 million items, mainly out of copyright books. The IA also contains information in other formats: Moving images, Audio material, Software, and Educational resources.
• Internet Public Library: directory of online text collections, projects and services covering all subject areas hosted at the University of Michigan
• New Bartleby Library (aka Project Bartleby Archive): freely available electronic reference works (classic cookery books, Gray's Anatomy, Roget's Thesaurus, etc.), verse works, fiction, and non-fiction, e-books or anthologies. Includes the complete 70 volumes of the Harvard Classics series, the Oxford Shakespeare, and many others
• Online Book Initiative: web link to FTP service
• Online Books Page: directory of online texts on the internet, compiled, hosted and managed by the University of Pennsylvania Library. Try the search screen, or browse the listings.
• Online Literature Library: out-of-copyright classics in literature.
• Oxford Text Archive: electronic plain-text versions of (mainly out-of copyright) texts in literature, languages, and linguistics (including manuscripts). Currently 2,500 plus texts deposited, ranging from Asterius the Sophist, to Peter Ustinov, taking in Bach, Housman, Marx, and Pope on the way. You need to submit your email address, and texts will be emailed to you as a WinZip file.
• Project Gutenberg: homepage of a free, e-book producing project (not related to the British Library's digitisation of the Gutenberg Bible). Project Gutenberg produces no-frills, sparsely formatted, (mainly ascii) text only electronic versions of out-of-copyright books (classic novels, plays and literature).
• Turning the pages: digitised manuscripts from the British Library
• UC Press E-Books Collection, 1982-2004: selection of digitised books on various subjects and from various publishers, collated by the University of California (part of the California Digital Library project). See the "Public" collection for texts that can be freely downloaded (over 500 titles).
• UVa Library Digital Collections: catalogue of resources from the University of Virginia's digitisation project, covering mainly American literature, history and architecture.