Ebook FAQ for VCU Libraries

** On May 1, 2025, Ebook Central changed the default online reading format from PDF to EPUB  (if available) to improve accessibility and enhance compatibility with assistive technologies. Users can toggle between EPUB and PDF where both are available. If PDF is preferred, see below for instructions on how to switch from EPUB to PDF view. **

Licensing Overview

• User Licenses: Varies. See details in the "User Licenses" box below.
• Subscription or Perpetual Access? 
  • Perpetual: Ebooks in the "ProQuest Ebook Central Titles" collection are perpetually owned. These ebooks may have 1-, 3-, or Unlimited user licenses.
  • Subscription: Ebooks in the "Ebook Central Academic Complete" and "Ebook Central College Complete" collections are subscription collections, where titles can come and go. All of these ebooks have unlimited user licenses.
  • Note: Some perpetual titles with 1- or 3-user licenses will have Unlimited user licenses available if they are also part of the Academic Complete or College Complete subscription packages. If/when the perpetually-owned title is no longer part of our Academic Complete/College Complete subscriptions, then the user licenses will revert back to their respective 1- or 3-user licenses.
• DRM-free? Varies. Certain titles on this platform do not have viewing, printing, or downloading restrictions, nor do they require a vendor login, but others do. You will need access to the LibCentral admin dashboard to view a full list of DRM-free titles. 

List of all Ebook Titles in This Collection

Users must have access to the LibCentral admin dashboard to obtain a full title list. If you require this list, please contact a Collections Librarian at Cabell or the Health Sciences Library. ProQuest's website includes instruction on how to export a title list from the admin dashboard.

• How often are titles added? 
  On ProQuest's EBook Central platform, there are three different collections available: (1) Academic Complete, (2) College Complete, and (3) ProQuest Ebook Central Titles. Titles are added at different times for each of these collections, as described below.
  • ​Academic Complete and College Complete subscription collections: Titles that belong to our "​Academic Complete" or "College Complete" collection subscriptions are added four times a year (i.e. January, April, July, and October).
  • ProQuest Ebook Central Titles: Ebook Central books that belong to our "ProQuest Ebook Central Titles" collection are added as needed by the collections librarians throughout the year.
• How often are titles removed? 
  • Academic Complete and College Complete subscription collections: These collections typically have titles removed twice a year -- at the end of June and the end of December. Generally, VCU Libraries' administrators should receive 1-month's notice or more for removals. 
  • ProQuest Ebook Central Titles: Ebook Central books that belong to our "ProQuest Ebook Central Titles" collection are permanently purchased for VCU Libraries' collection. In theory, we should have perpetual access to these titles.

Accessibility

Clarivate's accessibility statement for Ebook Central is available online.

MAYBE. The best ebooks for required classroom use are those that are owned by VCU Libraries with unlimited licensing. This means that you will need to verify the following:

• in Primo (i.e. the library website), you can see that the book is part of the "ProQuest Ebook Central Titles" collection; and
• its user license is "Unlimited" (see "User Licenses" box below).

Many of the books in the "ProQuest Ebook Central Titles" collection have 1-user licenses and are not unlimited. We do not recommend books with 1-user licenses for use as course content even with small classes, due to the inability to guarantee access to all in the class. At the most, these may be considered for recommended (and not required) classroom use, although such use is still not suggested.

Ebooks that are part of our "Academic Complete" or "College Complete" collections may also be used for required course materials -- all of these ebooks have unlimited licenses -- but please be aware that titles can come and go on this platform since we may not perpetually own those titles. Instructors should check that the ebook still exists at the beginning of every semester and contact the library if it has disappeared, to see if the library is able to purchase it (which may be unlikely at that point).

Some Ebook Central books with 1-user licenses can be upgraded to Unlimited licenses. If instructors are interested in a book that is currently available on Ebook Central, please ask them to submit a purchase request form to see if VCU Libraries can purchase a perpetual, unlimited copy of the ebook for their course.  

More information on this topic is available at our Library Ebooks as Course Materials research guide.

Varies. 

On the Table of Contents page, look under "Availability" to view the licensing terms for an Ebook. The most common Ebook Central licenses are for 1 user or Unlimited, although in some instances you may see a message that states "Sorry, this book is not available. Please contact your librarian about purchasing it, or search for another book" because it's unavailable to the U.S.

Below is an example of an Ebook Central ebook that can only be accessed by 1 person at a time.

If an ebook with a 1-user license is being used, then you will see the following:

There are three different collections available on this platform: (1) Academic Complete, (2) College Complete, and (3) ProQuest Ebook Central Titles. See below for more information about each collection's user licenses.

ProQuest Ebook Central Titles. Ebooks that are perpetually owned will appear under the "ProQuest Ebook Central Titles" collection when you search for them using the library's website. 

• Many ebooks that VCU Libraries perpetually own are for 1 user only, although some are for 3 users, Unlimited, or have a Non-Linear license.
  • For ebooks with 1-user or 3-user licenses, you will not be able to view the book if 1 or 3 people respectively are using it, but you can try to access it again later by refreshing your browser.
  • For ebooks with Unlimited licenses, anyone at VCU can access those ebooks anytime, and because they fall under the "ProQuest Ebook Central Titles" collection, we have perpetual access to those titles.
  • For ebooks with Non-Linear licenses, anyone can read the book at the same time but access to the title will be cut off once there have been a certain number of loans (usually 325). Ebooks with Non-Linear licenses are not yet noted in Alma but this information is being added (per Mary Anne Dyer, 9/15/20). 
• The inactivity timeout period is 30 minutes.

Ebook Central Academic Complete or Ebook Central College Complete. If an ebook appears under the "Ebook Central Academic Complete" or "Ebook Central College Complete" collections when you search for it using the library's website, this means that it most likely has an Unlimited license, and anyone at VCU can access that ebook anytime. (Some ebooks are part of these subscription packages but are unavailable in the US; in these cases, you will see a message under the "Availability" heading that states "Sorry, this book is not available. Please contact your librarian about purchasing it, or search for another book.")

Ebooks that are part of either of these two collections -- and are not perpetually owned by VCU Libraries -- come and go according to the following schedule:

• Added 4 times a year (usually in January, April, July and October) .
• Removed 2 times a year (usually end of June and end of December).

Some ebooks may be both perpetually owned by VCU Libraries, and part of Academic Complete or College Complete. In those cases, you will have access to the highest level available (i.e. Unlimited instead of 1-user or 3-user limits). If you are an instructor for a course and have questions about ebook licensing for a particular title, please contact VCU Libraries.​

Currently, the default view for Ebook Central's ebooks is EPUB when this format is available for a title. If both EPUB and PDF versions are available for an ebook, you can switch to PDF view if this is preferred. Click "Read Online" to open the ebook, then when the ebook is open, click on the Book Details icon at the top right. This will open up a window that will allow you to click on the "Switch to PDF" button. See screenshot below.

Patrons who complain about how an ebook's contents are formatted when they save or print pages may need to switch their view to PDF before saving or printing. The PDF view more closely resembles how a title's contents are formatted in print. Note that publishers determine whether an ebook is available in EPUB and/or PDF formats, and that some ebooks may only be available in one format or the other.

Entire Ebook Download: Yes, but only for 3-user or Unlimited ebooks. Entire Ebook Central ebooks can be downloaded and accessed in one of three ways:

• through Adobe Digital Editions (see instructions here)
• through the Ebook Central Reader app (see instructions here), or 
• as a PDF (less common).

Please note that users may not be able to download Adobe Digital Editions to university or library computers. Downloading to Adobe Digital Editions is a cumbersome process, but may be worthwhile if the ebook is available in EPUB format and this is preferred over PDF. (See another vendor's description of EPUB vs. PDF)

• There is no limit to the number of times the same user can check out ebooks with 3-user or Unlimited licenses, although they may not be able to re-check out a 3-user ebook if someone else gets that spot first.
• Please note that we have disabled downloading for ebooks with 1-user licenses since that disables anyone else's access to it for the loan period.

Chapter Downloads: Yes, if it falls within a page limit requirement. Chapters or parts of chapters can be downloaded as a PDF or printed for offline access.

Ebook Central's default setting allows 40% of a book to be printed or downloaded every 24 hours -- so yes, the limit resets after 24 hours -- but some publishers have set lower copy/print limits per 24-hour periods for their ebooks. The number of pages that can be printed/downloaded are stated on each ebook's home page -- in the Availability section above the Table of Contents -- as shown below. 

Whether a full chapter can be downloaded as a PDF because it meets the download/print page limit can be viewed in the Table of Contents. For the sample book above, any chapters that exceed 26 pages may not be printed in 1 sitting, as shown below. Users may, however, still print parts of that chapter by selecting a page range to print/download, as long as the number of pages do not exceed the print/download limit.

To print/download specific pages, view the book online and click on the Print to PDF icon to select the page range you need to print.

If you need more information about chapter downloads, try the ProQuest website for more details.

The best ebook link to provide library users is the Primo (library website) permalink. Finding a permalink that includes "alma" (rather than "cdi") in the last part of the URL is your best bet, since those records are more likely to be stable.

If you require a direct link to the ebook, however, you can follow either of the instructions below to provide library users with links that should work on and off campus. Please be aware that if the publisher changes their ebook URLs that the links you generate below may stop working.

On campus
If you are creating this link on campus, use the following instructions to generate a URL that will allow your on- and off-campus users to access this ebook.

• It is strongly recommended that you click on the "Share Link to Book" button to obtain and copy a permalink that can be shared with others at VCU. This is the best way to ensure that library users will have access to this book both on and off campus.

Off campus
If you are creating this link off campus, use the following instructions to generate a URL that will allow your on- and off-campus users to access this ebook.​

• Follow the on-campus instructions above.

• Although Ebook Central contains one of our largest collections of ebooks, please recommend to library users that they search all of VCU Libraries' holdings for books, since the book they're looking for may be available on a different platform.
• The inactivity timeout for Ebook Central ebooks is 30 minutes.
• It may be useful to review Ebook Central's list of supported devices, Operating Systems, and Browsers, as well as their page on deleting Ebook Central cookies and cache.
• Some publishers supply ProQuest with EPUB files and not PDFs. EPUB files are viewed through Ebook Central's e-pub reader and not the PDF reader most of their other ebooks use. Typically, the EPUB files are the ebooks that appear as 2 pages on the screen, and not 1.
  • [Resolved by Zotero 12/2/24] In Aug. 2024, it was discovered that some patrons trying to read EPUB ebooks online on the Ebook Central platform can only see blank pages. This is due to an issue involving the Zotero browser extension on Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome, Brave, and Edge. It may not be an issue with Firefox. It is recommended that patrons try a different browser or disable/uninstall Zotero to read the EPUB ebook.
  • As of Sept. 2020, the EPUB reader did not have all of the functionality that PDF readers have, but enhancements were being worked on by the engineering team.
  • Per a rep on 9/9/20: "Simon and Schuster and Penguin Random House are the two big publishers that are epub only. Some publishers have a mixture of both epub and pdf titles."
• Please visit ProQuest's Ebook Central LibGuide for more information about this platform.