eBook collections

We have a large collection of ebooks which are available for staff and students of the University. They are available via a number of platforms, so ebooks don’t all look the same. In order to use ebooks, you may need to use software such as Adobe Reader or install a plugin via your browser.

We are also investing in patron-driven acquisition, whereby potentially useful titles are loaded into the library catalogue and only paid for if they are used. You won’t know if you are buying a new ebook or accessing one of our existing titles – what matters is that you have information delivered to your desktop when you need it.

You can search within each of these collections by using the links on this page. However, you can also use Discovery or our Library Catalogue to search for individual ebooks, both by known author and/or title details and by keyword. Both of these give you the option to do a search and then narrow the results down by selecting just ebooks.

Please note that there can be a short delay before newly purchased ebooks appear on the library catalogue; if you find one that says it is ‘on order’, you should be able to find it by looking directly in Ebook Central.

 

Major eBook Collections

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Additional eBook Resources

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Access thousands of chapters on major authors, periods and genres, written by experts and designed for student readers.

fully searchable in EBSCO Discovery

Authoritative summaries of the seminal works that have established a field of research, from prior years. World renowned experts research and select the most important readings. 

Access around 800 etextbooks from Cambridge University Press. Titles cover many subjects across the Humanities, Social Sciences, Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Medicine and Nursing. Anyone with a UoP username can access all the content but if you want to take advantage of extra features such as bookmarking, annotations, reading on a mobile device and copying/printing up to 15% of any title, you should register for a personal account on the Cambridge package. This short video shows how you can use bookmarking, highlighting etc. available via the Read online button.

You can store up to 20 books for offline reading on a computer or mobile device and features such as bookmarks and highlights will sync between your online and offline versions. To take advantage of this select the ‘Add to offline bookshelf’ button on the book page. Once this is done, you will receive a message to confirm it has been added for you so that you can read the book using the Cambridge Spiral app.

fully searchable in EBSCO Discovery

The full text of thousands of books published in Britain from 1475 to 1900. This collection comprises Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), plus nineteenth century books from the British Library collection.

This version will cease to exist on 31st July 2024. We already have separate access to ECCO via Gale and will have EEBO via ProQuest (this is currently being trialled).

fully searchable in EBSCO Discovery

Each Oxford Handbook offers an authoritative and state-of-the-art survey of current thinking and research. Specially commissioned essays from leading international figures in the discipline give critical examination of the progress and direction of debates, providing researchers and students with compelling new perspectives.

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Over 250 unlimited access in-depth guides to current and classic research across a range of subject areas. If you can't access something via this site, put the book title into our general Portsmouth catalogue as we have some titles via Ebook Central instead.

fully searchable in EBSCO Discovery

A collection of over 500 full-text social science textbooks from SAGE.