Among other topics, our March 23 blog post, Finally, a Coronavirus-less message from your library! (https://blogs.nvcc.edu/lolibrary/2020/03/23/finally-a-coronavirus-less-message-from-your-library/), featured a how-to for finding eBooks in the NVCC library. There are resources for free ebooks that are not limited to NOVA students. For example, “HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries” that have digitized more than 17 million items, including books that are out of copyright (hathitrust.org).
The Internet Archive’s (archive.org) Open Library (openlibrary.org) allows ebooks to be borrowed as one would from a traditional library. Individuals can sign-up for free and then log in to search for the books they might wish to borrow.
One of the earliest sites for free ebooks, Project Gutenberg (Gutenberg.org) allows users to search for a specific title, browse the catalog, or limit by book category (e.g., classics, children’s books, crime, education, fine arts, geography, history religion, science, social sciences). In addition to English, there are bookshelves for books in German, French, Italian, and Portuguese.
Several sources exist for downloading PDFs of “the classics, ” including ManyBooks (manybooks.net), PDFBooksWorld (pdfbooksworld.com) and Feedbooks (feedbooks.com) – Click “Public Domain” in the top navigation bar.
Two databases are a product of the OAPEN Foundation, a Netherlands-based not-for-profit organization: Directory of Open Access Books and the Open Access Publishing in European Networks
(OAPEN) Library.
• The Directory of Open Access Books (doabooks.org) strives to increase the discoverability of Open Access Books. It includes academic, peer-reviewed books, meaning that it limits its collection to open access publications that meet academic standards.
• The OAPEN Library (www.oapen.org) is a collection of freely accessible academic books, primarily in the humanities and social sciences, developed under a 30-month grant, 2008-2010. During the grant period, OAPEN worked with publishers to build a quality-controlled collection of open access books and digitally preserve the content.
eTextbooks
Our March 25 blog post, Working from home: wfh (https://blogs.nvcc.edu/lolibrary/2020/03/25/working-from-home-wfh/), shared with you the good news that NOVA students have access to textbooks via VitalSource (https://bookshelf.vitalsource.com/#/user/signin). Another vendor, Red Shelf (https://studentresponse.redshelf.com/), has negotiated with publishers to open their digital textbooks to college students. Use your NOVA email address to sign-up and you can access up to seven free ebooks, textbooks included, before May 25, 2020.
Your NOVA librarians are compiling a list of good reads. If you’re reading an interesting book, please let us know the title and why you think it’s a good book to recommend to others. We’ll add it to the list and share it in the NOVA community. Simply complete the form below.