E-Books are electronic versions of printed books.
Our e-book collections are available free for the Wits community (students, faculty, staff) through the Library Home Page or e-book. E-Books have limited user access and may only be available to one user at a time. Check individual e-book record for availability information.
EBSCOhost ebook
Geomaths Library has Kindles to download the PDFversion of library e books and journal articles. Please visit the Library Circulation desk to borrow a Kindle. A Kindle may be borrowed for two weeks and can be renewed depending on demand.
Limited access
Due to copyright issues and the preferences of book publishers, access to the contents of many digitized books in copyright (published after 1922 not in the public domain) is limited. In particular Google Books and Amazon provide a preview mode that allows only access to selected pages of and e-book. Access to some e-books is limited to the table of contents or the title page only. Some University presses allow full access to the content of their books online.
Full Text Searching Limitations
Many scholarly books have manual indexes to help users find the specific location of the information they need. Digitized books allow readers to search every word in the content of the book. But, caveat empto the accuracy of the search depends on the accuracy of the method used to digitize the content. Digitizing software (OCR, or optical character recognition software) is not 100% accurate at recognizing the words in the text. If only portions of the e-book are offered in full page view, your word searches may be limited to only those pages, not the entire book.
However, searching e-books is a very powerful and potentially time saving capability of e-books and e-book collections.