Primary Sources in American History: Books

Strategies for finding e-books

1. E-books accessible from Bowdoin are available through Compass. You can limit your search to materials available online.
2. The library has also purchased several collections of e-books, available through our list of Databases, including Ebook Central, Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800 w/ suppl., Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819 w/ suppl., Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Oxford Scholarship Online, and e-books and journals via SpringerLink. Books in these collections are also in Compass.
3. Search in Compass; limit to: Available online.

Other sources for e-books

HathiTrust Best Bet
Over 3.7 billion full-text searchable pages from almost 6 million book titles and almost 300,000 serial titles. Hint: To limit your search to materials that you will be able to read full-text, check "Full view only" below the search box. Login to HathiTrust to take full advantage of Bowdoin Library's membership benefits, allowing you to download full PDFs of public domain works. See Help or A User’s Guide to HathiTrust for more information.

Internet Archive
"Includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages." See Search for more information.

Digital Public Library of America
"An all-digital library that aggregates metadata — or information describing an item — and thumbnails for millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States." Note: Not all (any?) materials are full-text searchable.

Google Books
Books from all disciplines, many available full-text and full-text searchable. See Help for more information.

Library of Congress E-books
This guide points to some databases of e-books.