How To Use Ebook Central: Home

Ebook Central is a database containing more than 350,000 ebooks (online books) in all subject areas. 

Ebook Central titles are, for the most part, included in OneSearch, although that only searches the title, author and subject information (using Ebook Central allows you to search within the full-text of all the titles)

Access

1. Go to the library homepage at www.esc.edu/library.
2. Click Books.
3. In the alphabetical list of ebook databases, click Ebook Central.
4. Enter your college login and password

Search

The search box is at the top of every page in the database. Use keywords to search. If your keyword appears anywhere within the full text of a book, it will be returned in your results. 

Basic Search Tips:

• Put quotation marks around exact, commonly-used phrases to search those words as one unit rather than separately.
• Use AND between keywords to search for books containing both terms.
• For more information, see Using AND, OR & NOT to Combine Keywords.

Advanced Search

1. To use the Advanced Search, click the link, just under the search box on the landing page.
2. Enter your keywords in the search box.
3. To the left of the search box, select the type of search you want to do - author, title, etc. (the default is set to search keyword and full-text).
   1. BISAC Subject means searching with controlled vocabulary. For more information about that, see Controlled Vocabulary.

B‌rowse Subjects

Another way to find ebooks on your topic is to browse by topic/subject.‌

1. Click the Browse Subjects link under the search box.
2. Click a broad subject, such as Language. It will take you to a page of results. That subject's sub-topics are listed within the left side limit options, under Subject.

Results Page

The results list contains several useful features and options.

• Options on left to further limit your results, including to those that allow full downloading and printing.
• Sort and number of results to display option (above first result, on right)
• Results by book or from within individual book chapters (just above first result)
• Icons (to right of each title) to download, print, view table of contents and add to bookshelf.

Reading a Book

You generally (there are exceptions) have three options to read a specific title: 

1. Read it online (no time or page limit)
2. Download the whole thing (14 day time limit; sometimes not available)
3. Copy and paste or print some pages (number of pages limited, usually about a chapter's worth)
4. Some ebrary books can be read by unlimited numbers of people. Others can only be read by one user at a time. That information will be given under Availability. 

This page will also give you some information about the book.

1. Title, contributors (authors or editors,) publisher, publication date, language, number of pages, etc. 
2. Click the Share Link to Book button in order to get the permalink for the ebook. This is what you will need in order to email the link to someone, put it in a discussion post, or put it in your citation. (The URL in the address bar of your browser won't work!)
3. Click the Cite Book button to get a MLA, APA, or Chicago formatted citation. 
4. At the bottom of the center of the page are links to the different sections of the book (table of contents).

Once you've clicked on one of those content links, you're in the book itself. 

1. There are forward and back arrows above and to the right of the page display, for turning the pages (or you can use the scrolling function on the far right).
2. There are icons on the left side to display book details, the table of contents, annotations, and to search within the book.
3. There are many other options above the page, such as to print or download, add your own custom notes or bookmarks, and to zoom. 

Some features will only be able to be used (especially print and download) once you are logged in with your Ebook Central username and password (which are separate from your Empire account).