Most of Duke’s e-books are provided by a service called NetLibrary. The 24,000+ e-books can be viewed at the site but not downloaded, and printing is cumbersome.

You can go directly to NetLibrary and search for e-books, or find them in our catalog and click on the link into NetLibrary. Once at the NetLibrary site, you need to create a free log-in and password to access a book. You can then “check out” the book, usually for 4 hours, unless someone else is using it.

If you are off campus you will need to make sure that NetLibrary is recognizing you as a Duke user. Look for the little Duke window at the top left of the page. If it’s not there, you will need to turn on the Duke VPN if you use it, or force our EZProxy server to ask you for a Duke NetID and password. To do this, go back to the library home page and search for NetLibrary using the Databases tab. When you click the link in the results, you should get a pop-up asking for your NetID and password.

(You can also force EZProxy by right-clicking on the page and following the link when you are using the LibX plugin. Just another reason that LibX is so great!)

Written by Phoebe Acheson