Welcome to “The Highlighter,” where we’ll be exploring the various new and old services and resources available through the Falvey!

Yesterday, Sept. 18, marked National Read an eBook Day. Last year, we celebrated the day by bringing you some recommendations on which eBooks to read. This year, recognizing the quantity and quality of eBooks available through the Falvey, I dug a little deeper. Description Management Librarian David Burke provided me with the just the information I needed:

WR: Just how many eBooks are available to those with access to the Falvey’s catalog and databases?

DB: We have access to nearly 300,000 unique eBooks available through several platforms and publishers.

Are these mostly contemporary novels and academic journals?

They come in many different types.  Some collections consist of digital facsimiles of old published works—for example, Early English Books Online is a collections of books, pamphlets, and other primary source material published in the late 1400’s (about when printing came to England) to 1700.

David Burke, Description Management Librarian and knower of all things eBook -related at the Falvey.

Are most eBooks, then, just digital versions of physical books whose copyrights have elapsed?

Well, others are published collections of specific publishers, including Wiley, the University of Oxford Press, and Springer (from this last we have over 37,000 titles).  And there are platforms featuring titles from various publishers including JSTOR, Ebook Central (a subsidiary of ProQuest), and Project Muse.

Are most historical in nature?

Subjects covered by these ebooks are all across the board, and vary from 2 page pamphlets to multi-volume encyclopedia to novels.

Can I access some of the materials in our own Special Collections as eBooks?

Of course! We also have our locally-digitized collections of eBooks within the Digital Library, especially our dime novel collection.

Article by William Repetto, a graduate assistant in the Communication and Marketing Dept. at the Falvey Memorial Library. He is currently pursuing an MA in English at Villanova University.