Review of British Library (India)’s Online Library

Many of us members had a heartburn as the British Libraries in India withdrew many engineering and IT Books. We were sad that many good books from our fields would no longer be available. However, we now also have the option of taking the online membership. As of 2014, the online membership for e-books and e-journals cost Rs. 600 each. They are available as an add-on to your membership (and will expire along with your membership). Alternatively, one can subscribe to both e-books and e-journals for Rs. 1100. Since there was no mention of what the new service looks like, I thought it would be good to publish a review of this new facility to wanna be subscribers.

The catalogue section of the webpage might not give a good understanding of what books are likely to be available. After you login to the library webpage to your account that you get the link to access the online library.

The link will take you to a new site, that of ebrary. Books are arranged by a range of topics, as shown below. There is also an app for Android or iOS devices which requires you to authorize your device with your account credentials.

Let me focus on the content first. There are eBooks from various subjects as shown above. There is also a search box to search for particular terms. The following is a snapshot of the Computers and IT section:

Browsing through the section showed a good collection of some well-known and some not-so well-known books. Nevertheless, a large variety of topics seem to be covered. I could find books on Java, C++, Android, HTML5, PHP, mySQL, Python, etc. I could also find books on algorithms, security, analytics, data mining, and also on Raspberry Pi, Arduino, etc., which would be great for hobbyists. In my experience, it is better to search for what you are looking for rather than browse for books (the way you would do in a real library).
Let me show some searches from fields that I am aware of. For e.g., when I search for the term “Heat Transfer”, I get the following result:

Titles include books by Indian authors. A search for the term “Fluid Mechanics” showed the following results:

Again, though some of most popular titles do not seem to be available, it is still a decent selection of titles, in my opinion. A search for “Parallel Program” showed the following titles:

In some cases, after looking a bit deeper, you do get to see some good titles on a topic. The following show the results for the term “Finite Element”:

Scrolling down the pages also gives some truly good ones:

“Data mining” gave the following results:


A search for Sherlock Holmes gave the following results:

The search did yield the classics by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle along with other ones.
Now, lets come over to the interface itself. In the webpage, you can add books to your bookshelf.The bookshelf consists of folders that contain books, which is helpful. On opening a book, the content of the book opens on the left, while the other data, like the Table of contents, other information are shown on the right side. Annotation tools and search tools are available which can be handy. However, the display of the book leaves much to be desired. The actual content is only in one corner of the screen with a button to resize the window to fit the page. While this works, it is not very intuitive and the overall experience in my opinion is not very easy on the eyes or on the brain!

An alternative to reading on the web is to download. The site allows two options. One, to download individual chapters as PDF files which can be read on devices like the Kindle. However, the Kindle is not a great device to read PDF files. Also, my experience of this download method hasn’t been good. After repeated trials, it took me more than an hour to download a chapter of a book only to finish it in half an hour! It looks like some books don’t download due to publisher restrictions and there is no way to know that till your downloads repeatedly fail. The second option is to download the entire book. This option means that the book has been “lent” to you and the book expires in 14 days or you need to return it before that time. The second option uses Adobe Digital editions and can be opened on a PC but not on devices like the Kindle. On tablets such as the iPad, ebrary has an app that you can use. However, my opinion is that it is not as refined as some of the other apps like iBooks or the Kindle app. It would be really great to have a Kindle formatted file (Ok with DRM protection, if that is necessary).
So, overall, the ebrary experience from British Library India is decent and would in a way, compensate for the loss of physical textbooks from the libraries. The content seems to be good, but the form of delivery needs significant improvement. I am sure it will be a good source of reference for people who would like to have one. It is also good for those who wish to learn topics on their own. If you are looking for specific books, be wary of this service and you might be better off getting them yourselves.