“Read an E-Book Week” / March 6 – 12, 2011

 Did you know that electronic books or e-books, for short, have been around for 40 years?
It is true!
In 1971, Michael S. Hart embraced the idea that computers should do computing, but should also be used for the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries. His very first e-book was a copy of the Declaration of Independence.

From this quiet start, Mr. Hart founded Project Gutenberg which allows you access to 33,000 free e-books for your PC, iPad, iPhone, Kindle, Sony Reader, Android, and other portable devices. For more information about “Read an E-Book Week”.

Seminole State College Library has a large and growing collection of e-books. You can find them, along with the print books, by searching the Library’s Online Catalog.

Currently the Library has approximately 37,000 electronic books that come from two main vendors, NetLibrary and Ebrary, plus Gale Virtual Reference Library, which contains a collection of about fifty reference books.

 Ebrary, which requires the download of the free ebrary plug-in, contains close to twenty thousand scholarly books. This collection is growing and will continue to grow.

 NetLibrary has some scholarly books and some for more general reading.

Gale Virtual Reference Library doesn’t require any special software and is a good place to start to get background information on topics.

There are two ways to get to our e-books:

1.You can go to the Library’s Databases A-Z page and choose NetLibrary, Ebrary, or Gale Virtual Reference Library, then search each of these groups separately.

2.You can also go to the Library’s catalog, where you can search for books by topic and get a single list that includes all the books from these three collections that match your search plus all the matching paper books in the Library. Use the limiter "ebook".

To open the book, Click on the book title to go in the record.

Then click on the green "View online". Next log in with your 14-digit SSC ID and last 4 number of your Social Security or student number

So the next time you just need to quickly check on some information, whether for pleasure or for research, you might want to try e-books as an online source