McGill Quick Links

E-books & media

Borrowing E-books and E-audiobooks

Finding E-books

To find individual ebook titles, search the eBooks sub-catalogue in the Library Catalogue.

McGill subscriptions

  • AccessMedicine 
    AccessMed provides core content in internal medicine, cardiology, genetics, basic and clinical sciences, diagnosis and management, and patient care. It includes renowned titles such as Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, Hurst’s The Heart, Goodman and Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, The Metabolic and Molecular Bases of Inherited Disease, The LANGE Educational Library, a suite of texts covering topics such as biochemistry, histology, physiology, neuroanatomy, and pathology, as well as the Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment series.
  • AccessSurgery 
    AccessSurgery is organized by key topics to reflect the Accreditation College for Graduate Medical Education's (ACGME) mandate for a general surgery core curriculum. AccessSurgery contains key surgical textbooks, videos, differential diagnosis, and a drug index. It also provides access to 1,400 board review questions and answers and has the ability to track and report scores. Therefore, it is ideal for residents studying for the American Board of Surgery In-Training Examination (ABSITE) as well as for practicing surgeons seeking re-certification. Simply select a core curriculum topic or choose a procedure or operation to find relevant content from more than 12,000 pages of leading surgery texts.
  • The first time you access Books 24X7 you must click on "Register", enter your McGill e-mail address and click on "Accept". A password will be emailed to you shortly thereafter.
  • Provides access to a large collection of books in the sciences including behavioral & social science, sports medicine, and nutrition.
  • Collection of Christian texts from the Reformation and post-Reformation eras.
  • Papal documents, synodal decrees, catechisms, confessors' manuals, biblical commentaries, theological treatises, sacred drama, liturgical works, inquisitorial manuals, preaching guides, accounts of saints' lives, and devotional works written during the 16th and 17th centuries.
  • Books (all languages) published in England and books in English printed in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and British North America 1475-1700.
  • "Significant" English and foreign-language books, pamphlets, broadsides, ephemera printed in UK, and "important works" from the Americas, 1701-1800.
  • A collection of over 3,000 ebooks, including several hundred on education and related subjects.
  • More than 1,200 works from some of the greatest legal minds in history, including Joseph Story, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin N. Cardozo and Edwardo Coke. In addition to many "classics", this collection includes rare items that are found in only a handful of libraries around the world. The collection focuses on constitutional law, political science, and other classic topics.
  • Technical reference collection for science and engineering with interactive tables and graphs.
  • A collection of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, 228 full-text literature journals, and other key criticism and reference resources.
  • The Myilibrary collection contains over 2,000 e-books including subjects such as inclusive education, history of education, and the theory and practice of education. A small number of book titles are in French and Spanish.
  • Over 7500 e-books - both old and new titles - published by Palgrave Macmillan in eleven subject areas in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Business, organized by year of publication and by discipline, available in PDF and EPUB formats. EPUB format allows users to download the title(s) of interest to most hand-held reading devices.
  • Books and chapters from the American Psychological Association (APA).
  • Safari Tech Books Online
  • ScienceDirect provides detailed and exhaustive coverage of books and journals in the physical, biological and social sciences. McGill subscriptions are indicated by a bright green square box.
  • Electronic database of reproducible laboratory protocols in the Life and Biomedical Sciences.
  • SpringerLink provides online access to over 15,500 multidisciplinary book titles. McGill subscriptions are indicated by a bright green square box.
  • STAT!Ref is an electronic medical library with a collection of books on a wide variety of health specialties including psychotherapy, psychiatry and physiology. It includes the most recent edition of the DSM-IV-TR, and the Dictionary of Medical Acronyms and Abbreviations.
  • The Thieme ElectronicBook Library features a series of exquisitely illustrated atlases and review books. Currently available are over 25 core titles in areas such as anatomy, physiology, and others.
  • Access to over 88,000 pages of content from general science books, monographs, undergraduate and graduate textbooks and major reference works in Theoretical and Computational Physics, Molecular, Quantum and Plasma Physics, Space Sciences and Cosmology, Materials and Devices, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Biomedical and Biophysics, Measurement and Engineering, Optics and Electro-optics, and General and Popular Science.
  • McGill Library users have access to over 900 titles in the Wiley InterScience Online Books collection which is divided into 13 broad categories. Each collections could either be browsed or searched. McGill Library does NOT subscribe to ALL the book titles in each of the Wiley collections. Check the Library Catalogue to ascertain whether or not a book is available to McGill users.


Free on the Web

  • Manybooks.net provides access to free public domain and Creative Commons licenced ebooks from Project Gutenburg and other sources. The ebooks are available in a variety of formats.
  • Search engine searches both e-books and the text within them.
  • Links maintained by the Internet Public Library.
  • Free web access to "important book collections from around the world", created by the Internet Library as assembled by allied institutions.
  • Public domain e-texts. Java applet interface.
  • The original e-book source.
  • 23000 public domain titles available via McGill OverDrive. They never expire and don’t count against your library checkout limit!
  • English only but a related page points to other Foreign Languages e-book lists.
  • Search entire text of public domain books, snippets from library books still under copyright, and sample pages from books submitted by publishers. In beta (2007-08-13). Most books are from the Google Print Publisher Program and Google Books Library Project."
  • Textes produits et diffusés par les membres bénévoles de l'Association des Bibliophiles Universels.
  • "... a portal which offers access to the combined resources (books, magazines, journals.... - both digital and non-digital) of the 45 national libraries of Europe. It offers free searching and delivers digital objects - some free, some priced.."
  • Beginning with digitization of 1 million books in 2006-2007, this project "to capture all books in digital format" continues at 50 scanning centers worldwide—all languages, all subjects, 1500-   .
  • De la Bibliothèque nationale de France. Comprend des images et des ouvrages relatifs à l'utopie, des textes par les auteurs de référence de la littérature française, le manuscrit du Temps retrouvé (Proust), les premiers enregistrements acoustiques, etc.
  • American Academy of Arts & Sciences Occasional Papers
  • Agricultural texts published between the early nineteenth century and the middle to late twentieth century. Full-text materials cover agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, animal science, crops and their protection, food science,forestry, human nutrition, rural sociology, and soil science.
  • Internet Archive: Text Archive
  • The NAP was created by the National Academies to publish the reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. The NAP, provides free (open access) access to over 3,000 publications dating back to 1977 on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and health. Books may be either browsed by category, or searched using NAP's Discover Engine.
  • "Specializes in collecting free fiction, tutorial, marketing and business eBooks."
  • "A compilation of over 240 great authors and their works" from the Access Foundation.
  • "Books on a wide range of national and international policy issues" in PDF.
  • Nearly 400 of over 1400 online titles, through a partnership with the University of California Press and the California Digital Library's eScholarship program, are available to the general public.
  • Fantasy novels published by Baen, in the main.
  • Working papers, reports, lecture series, workshop presentations, and other scholarship created by faculty at NELLCO (New England Law Library Consortium) member schools.
  • "TBR’s mission is to drive the adoption of free textbooks by teachers and professors. ... Our approach is to bring all of the free textbooks we can find together in one place, review them, and let the best rise to the top ..."
  • Digital library providing access to over 937,800 pages—some free, some subscription-based and McGill only—of Canada's printed heritage.
  • "Monographs from Canadian publishers". Storage location for all public documents in the Canadian Electronic Library available to the public without charge.
  • A.k.a. "Project Gutenberg Canada". View free electronic copy of books "in the Canadian public domain".
  • All OECD publications (1998- ), including online books, papers, statistics, replacing SourceOECD (2010): 1 200+ journal issues, 3 300 working papers, 2 900 multi-lingual summaries, 7 700 e-book titles, 16 000 tables and graphs, 25 000 chapters and articles, and 480 databases with more than 4.5 billion data points.
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