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Did you know that the Library has a huge range of free ebooks – 200,000 and counting! – which you can either read online or download for up to seven days?
To get started, browse our latest selection of ebooks and watch this space for new additions. You can also scan the list of past Ebookshelf titles or browse for even more free ebooks !
For tips and advice, read our Get started guide or watch our video on using ebooks.
To access ebooks from home, you need to be a State Library member with a Victorian home address. (Terms and conditions of use apply.)
Australian Magpie: Biology and Behaviour of an Unusual Songbird Australian Magpie: Biology and Behaviour of an Unusual Songbird Gisela Kaplan
Clayton South, Vic: CSIRO Publishing, 2019
The Australian magpie is one of our nation's most popular and iconic birds. It is loved for its impressive vocal abilities, propensity to play, excellent parenting and willingness to form enduring friendships with people.
Written by award-winning author Gisela Kaplan, a leading authority on animal behaviour and Australian birds, this second edition of Australian Magpie is a thoroughly updated and substantially expanded account of the behaviour of these birds. With new chapters on classification, cognition and caring for young, it reveals the extraordinary capabilities of the magpie, including its complex social behaviour.
The author, who has devoted more than 20 years to studying and interacting with magpies, brings together the latest research on the magpie's biology and behaviour, along with information on the origin of magpies, their development and health not published previously.
Art for the Country: the Story of Victoria's Regional Art Galleries Art for the Country: the Story of Victoria's Regional Art Galleries Don Edgar
North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2019
Victoria’s regional art galleries have a colourful history replete with political drama, directors vilified, battles with arts bureaucrats, generous benefactors and dedicated citizens fighting for a better deal for the arts in everyday life.The early galleries in Ballarat, Bendigo, Warrnambool and Geelong grew out of post-Gold Rush wealth and the desire of prominent citizens to improve the quality of cultural life.
In the post-War years a new movement, beginning in Mildura, began to fight for the rights of all rural citizens to have exposure to the arts, through improved government funding and assistance from the National Gallery of Victoria. The new galleries had a regional focus, led by visionaries and not always supported by local councils and ratepayers whose priorities lay with practical needs such as paved roads, sewers and sporting fields.
The conflicts continue to this day. This is the ongoing story of Art for the Country .
Zelensky: Ukraine's President and His Country Zelensky: Ukraine's President and His Country Steven Derix and Marine Shelkunova
London: Canbury Press, 2022
Covering Zelensky's life from his childhood to the Ukrainian presidency, Zelensky deals with his background in a Russian-speaking region of Ukraine; his early career in TV taking part in KVN talent competitions; his rise through the Ukrainian and Russian television industry; and his breakthrough moment in the TV series Servant of the People playing a teacher, Vasyl Holoborodko, who dreams of reforming Ukraine and ending its corruption.
Zelensky: Ukraine's President and His Country is the first major biography of Ukraine's leader written for a Western audience. Told with flair and authority, it is the gripping story of one of the most admired and inspirational leaders in the world.
The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now Hilke Schellmann
New York, NY: Hachette Books, 2024
In The Algorithm , Emmy Award winning Wall Street Journal and Guardian contributor Hilke Schellmann delivers a shocking and illuminating exposé on one of the most pressing civil rights issues of our time: how AI has quietly, and mostly out of sight, taken over the world of work.
The author takes readers on a journalistic detective story, meeting job applicants and employees who have been subjected to these technologies, playing AI-based video games that companies use for hiring, and investigating algorithms that scan our online activity to construct personality profiles. She convinces whistleblowers to share results of faulty AI-tools, and tests algorithms that analyse job candidates’ facial expressions and tools that predict from our voices if we are anxious or depressed. Schellmann finds employees whose every keystrokes were tracked and AI that analyses group discussions or even predicts when someone may leave a company. Her reporting reveals in detail how much employers already know about us and how little we know about the technologies that are used on us.
The History of the London Underground Map The History of the London Underground Map Caroline Roope
Yorkshire: Pen & Sword, 2022
Few transportation maps can boast the pedigree that London’s iconic ‘Tube’ map can. Sported on t-shirts, keyrings, duvet covers, and most recently, downloaded an astonishing twenty million times in app form, the map remains a long-standing icon of British design and ingenuity. Hailed by the art and design community as a cultural artefact, it has also inspired other culturally important pieces of artwork. But it almost didn’t make it out of the notepad it was designed in.
The story of how the Underground map evolved is almost as troubled and fraught with complexities as the transport network it represents. Mapping the Underground was not for the faint-hearted – it rapidly became a source of frustration, and in some cases obsession – often driving its custodians to the point of distraction. The solution, when eventually found, would not only revolutionise the movement of people around the city but change the way we visualise London forever.
Caroline Roope’s book casts the Underground in a new light, placing the world’s most famous transit network and its even more famous map in its wider historical and cultural context.
We That Are Left Lisa Bigelow
Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2017
Melbourne, 1941. Headstrong young Mae meets and falls head over heels in love with Harry Parker, a dashing naval engineer. After a whirlwind courtship they marry, and Mae is heavily pregnant when she hears that Harry has just received his dream posting to HMAS Sydney. Just after Mae becomes a mother, she learns Harry's ship is missing. Meanwhile, Grace Fowler is battling prejudice to become a reporter on the afternoon daily newspaper, The Tribune , while waiting for word on whether her journalist boyfriend Phil Taylor, captured during the fall of Singapore, is still alive. Surrounded by their friends and families, Mae and Grace struggle to keep hope alive in the face of hardship and despair.
Set in inner Melbourne and rural Victoria, We That Are Left is a moving and haunting novel about love and war, the terrifyingly thin line between happiness and tragedy, and how servicemen and women are not the only lives lost when tragedy strikes during war.
Summer of the Red Wolf Morris West
Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2017
A famous writer travels to the remote, windswept islands of Scotland's Outer Hebrides looking for peace of mind and a chance to dispel his inner demons. On the way, a car accident throws him together with the raven-haired doctor Kathleen McNeil. He also falls in with the Red Wolf, a man who lives by the old codes-some of them violent.
As a love triangle develops, the refined, civilised writer finds himself pitted against the rough-hewn man of nature.
Summer of the Red Wolf is an epic story for a modern age; a fast-paced narrative in a rugged landscape, driven by the timeless themes of love and jealousy.
Female Innovators Who Changed Our World Female Innovators Who Changed Our World Emma Shimizu
Yorkshire: Pen & Sword History, 2022
We are not all born with equal opportunities. Yet there have been countless of women who have overcome a range of barriers such as prejudice, illness, and personal tragedy to advance our understanding of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). They used their knowledge to change the world, and their stories are fascinating. This book offers a concise introduction of the lives of 46 women, taking you into the cultural and social context of the world they lived in.
Through their intelligence, courage, and resilience, they used STEM to defy expectations and inspire generations to follow in their footsteps. Some of them invented items we use day-to-day and discovered causes and treatments for epidemics that ostracised whole sections of society, whilst others campaigned for the reproductive rights of women and harnessed mathematics to send people into space and break ciphers. These women are proof that females can and did have a hugely significant role in shaping the world we live in today.
