E-books

• Electronic books (e-books) provide the full text of books electronically via the internet. They can be accessed on your desktop or on mobile devices via the library catalogue 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

• 24 hour off campus access.
• They cannot become overdue, so no fines!
• You can search within an e-book using keywords.

• Some e-books are quite hard to navigate, allowing you to move only a page at a time; moving back and forth, as you would with a print book, can sometimes be difficult.
• Some e-books limit the amount of downloading or printing you can do, and must be read mostly online.
• If you find it difficult to learn from an e-book, remember to look at the print version of the book as well!

• London Met Library is actively growing its collection of e-books and we presently have over 9000 e-books (March 2012).
• Not all publishers are making their books available as e-books, some publishers make some of their books available, but not others.
• Watch this space! More e-books are available each week.

• E-books are best accessed via the library catalogue using author/title, keyword searches. You will then see the words ‘E-resource’ under the title to show it is available electronically rather than, or as well as, in print.
• When you click on the title you will see a red box with the words ‘Available Online. E-book’.
• Click on E-book in the box.
• You will be asked to log in using your usual IT username and password.

Please note: If you want to search only for e-books, use the e-book search tab on left hand side of home catalogue page

• Yes, but only if the book contents are listed on the catalogue (less than 10% of titles).
• To search the contents of most e-books, first log into the e-book from the catalogue, and then browse or search the contents.
• To find material for coursework assignments, find an e-book with a broader scope than your essay topic, and search within it.

• They are the names of our main e-book suppliers but we also get e-books from EBL, Safari and other suppliers.
• They work slightly differently when downloading or using on a mobile device.

• Yes, though Dawsonera and Myilibrary recommend the Safari browser for Mac users.

• For most e-books, this is not a problem.
• Some e-book suppliers such as Palgrave only allow one user to look at the e-book at a time.
• Other suppliers may also limit use to a small number of users (in this case 5) at any one time. You will be able to access the item when the other user(s) have logged out.
• If you repeatedly have problems accessing an e-book, please contact your academic liaison librarian who may be able to increase access to more users.

• Yes, but e-books are protected by copyright law in the same way as printed publications!
• As a guide, UK copyright law allows you to print / copy no more than one chapter, or 5% of a work, whichever is the greater.
• The different e-book suppliers’ and publishers have different rules about this but once these limits are reached, you will not be able to print/copy any further text from that e-book.

For more detailed information, please go to the suppliers’ websites.

• Dawsonera - Print/download allowances from Dawsonera vary according to publisher but generally are up to 5% for printing and copy/pasting.
• EBL - Limits for printing = 20% . You cannot copy/paste.
• Informa - for printing = 5% Limits for copy/paste = 5% (per title, per user).
• MyiLibrary – Limits for printing / Download – 10 pages at a time until the copyright limit is reached (5% of the book or one chapter).
• Safari-Tech – Limits for printing – up to 5% or one chapter (per title, per user).
• ScienceDirect - Limits for printing = 5% Limits for Copy/Paste = 5% (per title, per user).
• Wiley Online Library – for printing = 5% Limits for Copy/Paste = 5% (per title, per user).

• You can download some e-book titles so that you can read the e-book off-line. However you don't need to download the titles to read them.
• You may need Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) or Adobe Reader to download.
• EBL e-books cannot be downloaded.
• We recommend using the download option with Dawsonera e-books as the "Read Online" option only permits you to open one PDF page at a time. Please ensure that your PDF viewer is set to Adobe Acrobat Reader. If your pages are displayed as blank then try reloading Adobe Acrobat Reader.
• In order to read Dawsonera books offline, it is necessary to download and open the e-book immediately, whilst you have Internet connection, as Dawsonera e-books need to connect to the Internet the first time the book is opened. After this you will be able to access the e-book offline for up to 7 days.
• For Dawsonera e-books you can download the whole book for a day/24 hours. You will lose access after this time but you can always go back and download the book again.
• For MyiLibrary e-books you can download only 10 pages at a time until limit is reached, and downloaded pages can be kept indefinitely.
• Safari Books are designed to be used online so do not have the facility to save pages or chapters.
  You can email links to pages or chapters of interest, either to yourself or to others.

Again, this depends on the e-book platform and the e-reader.

• iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch users will need a free e-book reader app to download e-books from EBL and Safari.
• At present, you cannot read online or download our e-books to a Kindle.
• Sony E-readers work with Dawsonera e-books but you can only download for one day/24 hours.
• MyLibrary allows limited downloads (see above).
• You can download free e-books to your mobile device via Project Gutenberg.

• Yes, you can read books on some mobile devices.
• Let us know via the Library Facebook or Twitter what mobile device you are reading our e-books on so we can update this section!

• Example in the bibliography:
• Thompson, R. (2010) Writing for broadcast journalists, 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge [Online] Available at: http://0-lib.myilibrary.com.emu.londonmet.ac.uk/Open.aspx?id=273264&loc=&srch=undefined&src=0
  (Accessed: 21 October 2011).
• Gregoriadis, Gregory, and Perrie,Yvonne. Liposomes. (Published Online: 15 JAN 2010). In: eLS, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd (2001-11). DOI: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0002656.pub2 (Accessed: 31st October 2011)

• Please contact your academic liaison librarian who is happy to help.