Research Guides

Ebook Collections

Ebook Options

At the Graduate Center, we prioritize ebooks that offer the least technical restrictions so that our patrons may make the best use of our collections. However, there are still many restricted ebooks in our collections. See the DRM tab on this guide for more information.

This page is meant to help show some of the ways to make use of the ebooks in our collections according to platform.

Jump to:

Restricted Users

Some ebooks in our collections have restrictions on how how many users can access or view the ebook at one time. These titles will be noted in OneSearch:

 

It can be confusing to find one of these titles because you may see a warning that doesn't give a lot of information, such as:

screenshot book in use

This screenshot is from Ebsco and indicates that someone is actively using the book online or they have electronically checked it out. Other platforms may have messages that are less clear about an ebook being inaccessible.

If you have questions or come across a strange situation with a particular ebook, please reach out to a librarian.

Ebsco Ebooks

The Ebsco ebooks platform often asks you to sign in in order to view the text. You can create an Ebscohost account which is separate from your CUNY or GC accounts to view options for Ebsco ebooks.

You can also view some ebooks without an Ebsco login. If you see "EPUB Full Text" for a particular ebook (on the left side of the screen), you can click through without Ebsco credentials:

Once you have opened the ebook, you can read it online through Ebsco's interface. You should see some options at the top of the screen. If you click "Save Pages" you will see how many pages you can extract and save as a PDF (the amount of pages varies by the book, the publisher, the length of the book, and other variables):

See also: Ebsco's guide on downloading ebooks.

Ebook Central

In Ebook Central, if you click "Download Book," you will be prompted to use Adobe Digital Editions software (which Ebook Central recommends only using on your own personal machine and not a public computer in the library) and to electronically check out a text for a limited amount of time.

Alternatively, as you can see in this example, each chapter can be downloaded as a PDF from the listed table of contents (in some cases up to a maximum number of pages). You can also click "Read Online" on the left.

In the "Read Online" view, there are more options at the top of the page to see what might be downloaded, saved, emailed, etc.; in some cases this will more easily show you what download options there for the ebook.

Clicking "Print to PDF" also may give you more options for downloading than just clicking "PDF":

See also: this useful library guide that walks through the components of an Ebook Central record.