Distance Learners: Find Books

This guide is intended to help distance learners use Wilkes University's online library resources.

Find Books at Farley Library

Use the Summon search box below to look for print and electronic books at Farley Library. Ebooks can be accessed online. Simply use the "book/ebook" and "full text online" limiters that appear on the left side of the screen, and click the "full-text online" link to open the ebook. You may be prompted to log in with your Wilkes username and password the first time you access full-text. You must visit Farley Library to check out print books in our collection. If you can't visit the campus, then you can submit book requests through your local public library's InterLibrary Loan service. 

Summon: Search the library for books, articles, newspapers, and more.

Search Summon

 

What is Summon?

Summon searches all library materials appropriate to college-level research simultaneously and ranks the results by relevance to your search terms. We call this type of research a "discovery search." Rather than repeating your search in several library databases for articles and the library catalog for books, you can do one search in Summon and receive results for all the articles, books, newspapers, reference sources, and more that we have on your topic. Whenever available, full text links appear on the search results page. Have questions about how to use Summon? A librarian will be happy to answer.

Search WorldCat

You can borrow any resource you find in WorldCat for free via InterLibrary Loan

E-mail PDFs

EBSCO eBook users can e-mail up to 60 pages of a book into a permanent PDF file, or you may download an entire e-book using Adobe Digital Editions.

E-mailed PDFs seem to load onto most e-book readers using the Bluefire Reader app on Apple and Android and the Adobe Reader app on Kindle.

To e-mail a PDF from EBSCO eBooks, select the e-mail icon from the menu on the right side of the screen, enter your e-mail address, and click “Send.”

Downloading from EBSCO eBooks

EBSCO eBooks offers 2 ways for you to view and read e-books:

  • Online within the web browser
  • Downloaded to Adobe Digital Editions

Downloading an entire book is a bit tricky the first time. Here are step-by-step instructions to help guide you. Although there are several steps to this process, many occur in rapid succession, so we hope the sheer number of steps won't deter you from trying out these instructions. Our librarians are happy to help you through this process, too!

 

1. Once you choose your e-book, click the "Download This eBook (Offline)" button. 

 

2. In order to download a book, you need to create an EBSCO account or sign in to an exisiting account. You don't need an account if you plan to just read the books online in a Web browser. 

 

3. After you have created an account, you will be logged into MyEBSCO. You will be prompted to Checkout & Download. 

 

4. After you Checkout & Download, you will receive a message confirming the download. To read a downloaded e-book, you need to download Adobe Digital Editions. Click on the Adobe Digital Editions link within the message box.

 

5. At the Adobe Digital Editions site, click "Download Now."

 

6. After you click "Download Now," you can select to download to a Mac or Windows. 

 

7. Select the setup file from your computer. Select “Run” and “Yes” in the next two menus. 

 

8. Next, read and agree to the license terms. 

 

9. Select the components that you want.

 

10. Select the destination folder and click “Install.”

 

11. Click “Close” to complete the installation.

 

12. In order to download and read e-books, you need both an EBSCO and an Adobe account. Let's create an Adobe account.  Select "Get an Adobe ID online". Fill in all of the requested details, and then click on the "Join Adobe" link. 

 

13. Enter your username and password in Adobe Digital Editions and click “Sign Up.” Success! You've activated Adobe Digital Editions. 

 

14. Now you can open the e-book you downloaded. Select “Add to Library” from the File menu in Adobe Digital Editions. Select the downloaded e-book file from your computer. You may have to select “Adobe Content Server Message” file type from the dropdown menu to see the downloaded e-book

 

15. And you're done! (Whew.) The e-book you selected should now appear in Digital Editions.

 

One final note: Through Adobe Digital Editions, e-books may be moved to various e-book readers and devices. Unfortunately, despite having accounts with both EBSCO and Adobe, e-books do NOT sync across computers. So if you download a book onto one computer using Digital Editions, you won't be able to log into Adobe from another computer and access the book. We recommend downloading e-books onto personal devices - rather than university or company devices - if you plan to use a book for multiple days.

 

NOTE: These instructions were adapted from those created by R. W. Bivens-Tatum of Princeton University Library and further adapted by Angie Thorpe of Indiana University Kokomo. Our thanks for their efforts to document these steps.