E-books or electronic books are electronic versions of printed books which can be read in full text online.
The Library has a growing collection of electronic books which are available from our main providers; Ebook Central, VLeBooks and O'Reilly.
The Library also subscribes to electronic resources that provide the full text of reference titles (encyclopaedias and dictionaries) and core texts electronically.
• They can be read on and off campus.
• They are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• For the majority of titles you don’t have to wait for a copy to be returned.
• You can easily search the content of an e-book, including the text, table of contents, appendices, and bibliography.
The easiest way to find and access e-books is to search the Library Catalogue, just like you would for printed books.
• You can search by author, title or keyword.
• You can also limit your search to just e-books by selecting E-book from the Item Type drop down menu.
• If the book is available online click on the "Click here to access" link.
• If you are off campus you will need to enter your college IT username and password.
There may be a number of reasons:
• Have you entered your college username and password correctly?
• Do you have Adobe Digital Editions installed? You can download the software for free from the Adobe website. If you are using a MAC or iPad you will need to ensure that the default reader is Adobe Acrobat.
• Do you have the latest operating system/web browser installed? Have you tried a different browser?
• Some e-books have limits on how many people can use them at the same time. If you cannot access the e-book try again later, as it may be that the book is already being used by the maximum number of users.
• Some titles allow you to reserve a copy in the same way as you would reserve a print book. If the title you are using has reached its limit then you will be given the option to add yourself to a queue. This reserves the e-book and you will receive an email when the book becomes available.
We recommend accessing e-books via the links on your reading list, or via the Library Catalogue. This will let the platform know that you are from Bradford College, and so are allowed to use e-books that the Library has purchased.
If you still can't access the e-book or get an error message, and cannot see any reason for it, please email askalibrarian@bradfordcollege.ac.uk providing details of any error message (include screenshots if possible), the details of the e-book you were trying to access and your contact details.
Not all print titles are also available as e-books.
Publishers decide whether to make individual titles available as e-books for libraries to purchase, and how much to charge.
Even though there might be a Kindle version available on Amazon, as a library we cannot buy 'direct to consumer' e-books such as Kindle ones.
If you need to access a title as an e-book, but can't find it on the Library Catalogue, please email askalibrarian@bradfordcollege.ac.uk and we will check whether or not a copy is available and if we can buy it for stock.
E-books are subject to the same copyright laws as print books.
E-books are also subject to DRM (Digital Rights Management) controls which are set by the publisher.
DRM is the way in which publishers manage the usage of their e-books.
DRM is used to limit concurrent users (the number of people using it at the same time) and to limit the number of pages a user can copy, print or download.
You will need to download Adobe Digital Editions to your laptop or pc.
The majority of our e-books allow you to download the entire e-book onto the local drive of your computer or memory stick for a designated period of 1 day.
You will lose access after this time but you can always go back and download the book again.
Copy and print facilities are not available from the downloaded pdf, but during the download period, you can make annotations, highlight text and use Adobe Reader accessibility options.
At present, you cannot download our e-books to a Kindle.
You can download e-books from VLeBooks to a device which is compatible with Adobe Digital Editions.
Ebook Central allows you to download e-books to other mobile devices and e-readers.
You will need to have Adobe Digital Editions installed on the computer you use for the download.
You can then transfer the document onto Adobe Digital Editions supported devices such as the Kobo and Sony eReader, or to an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch.
Ebook Central provides an accessibilty mode for use with screen readers which will enable the use of keyboard shortcuts and the provision of PDFs in a screen reader friendly format.
Additionally the e-books can be downloaded and read using Adobe Digital Editions on any compatible device.
VLeBooks online reader is compatible with screen readers that provide Optical Character Recognition (OCR) functionality, such as Read and Write Gold.
For software such as JAWS, NVDA and Claro Read, the e-book should be first downloaded to Adobe Digital Editions, as this software is not compatible with the VLeBooks online reader.
