Electronic Books

Search AUS Library Catalog for electronic or e-books

University Subscriptions

ebrary – Ebrary provides users with simultaneous, multi-user access to a growing collection of more than 30,000 full-text, digital books, reports, and other authoritative content from leading publishers. The user must first download the Ebrary reader, but this is simple and takes only moments. Ebrary also provides a Patron User Guide that provides details on the getting the most out of the Ebrary interface.

Safari Tech Books Online – an electronic reference library for information technology, desktop applications, software, and programming. Approximately 140 top titles are currently available from the following publishers: O’Reilly, Adobe, Cisco, Microsoft, Peach Pit and Que. Note: Limit of 2 concurrent users

Top Public E-book Sites

Digital Book Index – Digital Book Index provides links to more than 116,000 title records from more than 1800 commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities, and various private sites. About 75,000 of these books, texts, and documents are available free, while many others are available at very modest cost.

University of California Press – The eScholarship Editions collection includes almost 2000 books from academic presses on a range of topics, including art, science, history, music, religion, and fiction..

OnLine Books Page – 25,000 free books on the Web courtesy of University of Pennsylvania. 

Project Gutenberg – an ambitious program to get all the important world literature online, more than 17,000 texts are included, and can be downloaded with reasonable ease. 

Alex Catalogue – a collection of digital documents collected in the subject areas of English literature, American literature, and Western philosophy. 

The Best of the Rest

ChapterOne – the first chapters of over 130 current fiction and non-fiction titles, updated weekly. 

Classic Short Stories – some good reading that's short enough to read off the screen.  Authors include Saki, O.Henry, Twain, Balzac, Poe, DeMaupassant, etc. 

Internet Public Library of Online Texts – searchable author, title and subject classification, over 10,000 texts are included. 

National Academy Press Reading Room – 1000 full-text books, from the publisher of research from the National Academy of Science, National Institute of Medicine, etc. 

Free Audio Books

LibriVox – Search or browse the catalog of 950+ titles, or volunteer to read/record additional public domain works.

AudioBooksForFree.com – MP3, iPOD and DVD audiobooks (adventures, detectives, horrors, classics, children, non-fictions, philosophy, etc.) available for download.

Open Culture Audiobook Podcast Collection – Small collection of fiction and non-fiction audiobooks, as well as links to numerous audiobook podcast sites.

Podiobooks.com – “serialized audio books which are made available in podcast format.” You can receive episodes via RSS or download them directly. Registration is necessary, but free.

More free audio books sites available at ResourceShelf.