Our ebrary database is our best general collection of ebooks that would be considered "monographs." That is, regular books with chapters rather than reference books with entries. (For reference books, GVRL and Sage eReference are two better choices.) Most of these books are part of a subscription database of over 30,000 volumes called ebrary Academic Complete. But many others we have either purchased for our own library collection, or have posted to ebrary from various vendors, NGOs, government agencies, or public domain free sources.
Ebrary has a nice readable interface, similar to a standard PDF. And it has plenty of tools (some of which require setting up an individual account) like doing word searches within the book, highlighting, saving materials to a personal bookshelf, and printing chapters (within certain limits). For more, generally, on how to fully utilize ebrary, see their Quick Start Guide.
But many people want to read ebooks on their tablet, ebook reader, or on their smartphone. They don't want to be tethered to a computer. Until recently, readers of ebrary ebooks had no options in this regard. Now you do. Ebrary has launched a download function, which they are continuing to refine.
The details of this are best detailed by Amy's detailed LibGuide on the subject, since how you do the downloads and whether you can download entire books or only chapter PDFs vary from device to device.
As illustrated on the top screenshot, you will now see a download icon above the contents of ebrary ebooks. You will need to set up an account to make full use of the download functionality. Once you do, you should be able to download chapter PDFs for all books. And for those books designated to accept multiple simultaneous users, you will even be able to download the entire ebook to your personal device. Options for download will look like this:
For those books that only permit a single viewer at a time to use them, you will not be able to do a full-book download. Instead, you will see this message:
Getting this set up for the first time on your device will likely take a little time and effort. And Kindle readers are especially problematic. But do look through the tabbed pages of our guide for much more on how to use this new functionality.
