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A current awareness resource for students & faculty members in Business & Economics

Palgrave ebooks: PDF, ePub, Kindle, ReadCube... and no DRM!

Published by Mark Bodnar

As you may have noticed, the SFU Library provides access to thousands of ebooks. In fact, depending on how you define "book" (do government reports or digitized 18th-century documents count?) and "have" (do leased copies count the same as copies that we own in perpetuity?), we have somewhere around a gazillion of them.  (OK, I couldn't quickly find a solid number due to the shifting definitions, but I can tell you that our ebooks were downloaded 3,227,367 times by SFU researchers last year.) However, not all ebooks are created equal. Some of them still have very frustrating interfaces and license restrictions -- a sure sign that the ebook market has some maturing to do. Some, on the other hand, are a pleasure to work with.  For example, consider the ebooks that we buy via Palgrave.  We get these books under DRM-free licenses.  Our researchers (you) are welcome to download them for indefinite periods (no due dates!), read them offline, and store them on your own devices forever.  And they come with some pretty cool added features:

  • They can all be downloaded as complete books in PDF format, or you can choose to just download specific chapters. (Some publishers only offer the tedious chapter-by-chapter option.)
  • Many of them offer additional download formats:
    • Look for a "Mobile Download" link to grab an EPUB version of the title (handy for some readers).
    • Or look for a link to "Send to Kindle" if you use either a Kindle reader or a Kindle app; you'll then be able to enter your personal kindle email address and the ebook will be converted to Kindle format and sent to your device.
  • And, for a small number of the titles, there is an option to view the "Enhanced Book" - which will send you over to ReadCube where you can annotate, linkify, curate, and highlight the content (assuming you didn't already have a preferred method of doing so with the PDF or Kindle versions).
    • (Note: If you limit your search at the Palgrave site to the "Palgrave Pivot Titles" (this is a Content Type option on their Advanced Search page), I think you'll catch the ones that have an "Enhanced Book" option.)

The Palgrave ebooks that we own fall into several subject collections.  The ones most likely relevant to BUEC Buzz readers are:

And, casting the net a bit broader to areas related to business and economics:

The links above will take you the catalogue records for broad subject collections of our Palgrave ebooks. You could also go to Palgrave Connect E-books in our list of databases and search through the fulltext of all the ebooks we've bought from that publisher. Alternatively, if you'd just like a quick taste of what Palgrave has to offer, check out these titles...

Let us know if you have any questions! -- Mark, Andrea, Carla, and Megan ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  • Mark Bodnar (Business – Burnaby): mbodnar@sfu.ca
  • Megan Sorenson (Business – Vancouver): megan_sorenson@sfu.ca
  • Andrea Cameron (Business – Surrey): amcamero@sfu.ca
  • Carla Graebner (Economics – Burnaby): cgraebne@sfu.ca
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