1. As long as you have an Internet connection, ebooks are available anywhere in the world, immediately. Our ebooks extend the College Library to the Bread Loaf campus, our Schools Abroad, Monterey, and to research sites around the world in an instant. Our ebooks also don't care if the Library is closed.
2. Except for a small number of titles, more than one person can use our ebooks simultaneously, at any time of the day, including ebooks on Course Reserve. 
3. Ebooks have a lower carbon footprint than paper books (according to a study reporting in the New York Times) and you could argue that e-readers are greener than old-fashioned books.
4. Ebooks take up less room and weight on our bookshelves and in your backpack. With around 1 million physical items in the Middlebury Library, space is at a premium. (We're still adding thousands of paper books, newspapers, and journals every year too, which we hope you'll continue to enjoy!)

Our ebooks are listed in Summon and MIDCAT. Many of our larger collections can be searched separately too. We've listed a few here:

General academic ebooks

EBL "Ebook Library" one of our largest collections of ebooks in several languages. (go/ebl)

EBSCOhost eBook Collection A smaller collection of academic ebooks.

Science and technology ebooks

Safari Books Online over 20,000 technology and digital media books. (go/safari)

SpringerLink 53,000 ebooks in the fields of science, technology, and medicine. (go/springer)

Popular ebooks and audiobooks

Overdrive eBooks & Audiobooks popular and award-winning fiction and non-fiction. (go/books2go)

Humanities, languages, and historical collections

Early English Books Online (EEBO) virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America from 1473-1700. (go/eebo)

Early American Imprints (1639-1819) virtually every book, pamphlet and broadside published in America over 180 years.

e-libro: Over 45,000 texts of Spanish language books, research papers, and thesis.

In Summon and MIDCAT. 

Or browse downloadable audiobooks through Overdrive (go/books2go or go/audiobooks). These audiobooks can be played on a computer, a portable mp3 player, or mobile device. You can also browse audiobooks on CDs and downloadable audiobooks together by following this link to a MIDCAT search.

For the large majority of our ebooks, you'll need only a web browser and Internet connection. If you want to download and read ebooks offline see the next FAQ: "How do I download ebooks, read them offline, and move them to other devices?"

Many of our ebooks can be downloaded, moved between devices, and read offline. You will need special (free) software for that:

Adobe Digital Editions is required to download many ebooks for reading offline, moving between devices, and printing. For more help with downloading and moving EBL books between devices, follow our instructions for ebook Downloading.

iPads, iPhones or Android devices can download ebooks via the free Bluefire Reader app.

The OverDrive® Media Console lets you move audiobooks between devices and to copy them to CDs. 

Download the free Amazon Kindle Reading App for every major smartphone, tablet, and computer.

In some cases, yes! You'll find ebooks for the Kindle, Kindle App, Nook, and other compatible devices in Overdrive (go/books2go).

If your device has a web browser (like a smartphone or tablet) you can read all of our ebooks online. Printing and offline reading require some extra finagling. See the next FAQ "Can I print pages from ebooks?" for more details.

In most cases, printing can be done one page at a time through your web browser. Ebooks downloaded through Adobe® Digital Editions allow printing by the page, range of pages, or chapter. Printing is restricted to 20% of each ebook, and copying to 5%. Generally, our ebooks keep track of your printing so that you don't need to.

Millions of older, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books exist online. Take advantage of them! Here are a few:

Free eBooks

Classics from Middlebury's Overdrive collection (go/freebooks) browseable by subject and compatible with Adobe® Digital Editions

Kindle Popular Classics from Amazon

HathiTrust Over 3 million works available as full-text ebooks.

Internet Archive over 2.5 million free ebooks to read and download

Open Library over 1 million ebooks published between 1008 & 9999

Project Gutenberg over 40,000 free ebooks

Free Audiobooks

Audio Books For Free

LibriVox