Various platforms are available for the targeted search for electronic books:
Via the tab “E-Books” you will receive an overview of all electronic books. For the most part, these e-books are freely available on the internet (Open Access) and are indicated by a “green point” in the hit list. Often the results are dissertations, working papers or publications from national governments.
Otherwise, we make an effort, according to the library’s collection profile, to license electronic books and to list e-books from the database offering. These e-books are indicated by a “yellow point” in the hit list and are only accessible from within the Institute’s IP address area.
Link: Our Catalogue
This is a catalogue of e-books licensed by the Max Planck Society. The following are of particular interest:
• Brill Nijhoff E-Books Collections
• DeGruyter ReferenceGlobal
• The Digital Collection of Private Law of the MPI for Private Law (Digitale Sammlung Privatrecht des MPI für Privatrecht)
• Duncker & Humblot
• Encyclopedia Britannica
• The Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law
• Oxford English Dictionary
• Oxford Reference Online
• SourceOECD
• Springer
• Wiley Online Books
• WISO E-Books
Link: E-Books Catalogue of the Max Planck Society
MPG.ReNa provides you with a comprehensive overview of all e-books centrally licensed by the Max Planck Society.
Link: MPG.ReNa
You will find several hundred e-books in the Beck-online database of the publisher C.H. Beck. The most important e-books of relevance for our Institute are also listed in our library’s catalogue.
Link: Beck-online
Here you will find a series of commentaries and reference works. For example, this database contains the German Income Tax Commentary by Paul Kirchhoff or the German Civil Code Commentary by Erman.
Link: Wolters Kluwer Online
Since 2004, in order to improve the long-term supply of electronic technical information to German universities, research institutions and academic libraries, the German Research Association (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – DFG) has financed the acquisition of national licenses. The objective is to provide academics, students and academically interested private individuals access to databases, digital text collections and electronic journals free of charge. The offering of these national licenses is accessible from within the Max Planck Institute’s IP address area. This database site offers comprehensive search possibilities for over 16 of the e-book and text collections financed by the DFG with a total of more than 387,000 titles. You can find an overview of all resources supported within the context of the national licenses programme here.
Link: National licenses
“Google Books” is a service of the internet provider Google, which has the objective of making the contents of millions of books available worldwide, primarily through digitisation for full text searches. Google Books is supplied from two sources: Google Print, which is in a strict sense a no longer controversial cooperation project with publishers; and the legally controversial Google Library, whereby large numbers of primarily academic books are scanned even without the permission of the right holders.
Link: Google Books
