E-books from the University of Chicago Press

Many books published by the University of Chicago Press are available in electronic format. You can conveniently and quickly download e-books directly to your computer or handheld device. The books in the Chicago Shorts series are DRM-free and so have no restrictions on use. All our other e-books can be read using Adobe Digital Editions software, a free download from Adobe available for PC and Mac, as well as for e-book devices such as the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Kobo eReader, the Sony E-reader, and other devices. Third-party apps are available for reading Adobe Digital Editions on Apple devices; we recommend the Bluefire reader for the iPad. (But please note that other devices, including Amazon’s Kindle devices, are locked to their own stores and won’t be able to load e-books bought at our site. We do sell many of these e-book titles at Amazon as well, and encourage all Kindle device owners to check the Amazon site for Chicago titles to put on your Kindle. Note that the Chicago Shorts series is available from us in PRC format, which is readable on Kindles.) You may be interested in more about other e-book sources.

Our Two Options and Prices

After you place the book in the University of Chicago Press shopping cart, you will need to choose one of these e-book ownership options:

  • Perpetual ownership at list price
  • 45-day ownership for $10.00

Please note that these two options are available for most, but not all, of our e-books. Also, many of our e-books are in two formats: PDF and EPUB. PDFs replicate the pages of the print book; the EPUB version reflows to fit the screen of your device.

What Can I Do with My E-book?

  • You can read and annotate the contents of the e-book on six unique devices via a single ID.
  • You can print up to 50 pages of the book. (If you want to read from a printed page, we suggest that you buy the print edition rather than the e-book.)

    The fine print: We can’t guarantee that your printer will print from the e-book file. A few customers have reported printing problems. We think their issues have something to do with low memory errors. Most customers have not reported any trouble.

  • You can copy and paste text from the e-book document one page at a time.

    The fine print: We can’t promise that you’ll copy perfect text out of every book. Some of our e-books are derived from scans, so OCR errors may occur in the copied text. Or the copied text may not have spaces between all the words. Please expect that copied and pasted text will require proofreading.

  • The perpetual license gives you ownership of the e-book with these features indefinitely. The 30- license allows the same options but only for the time period chosen.

Registration for Adobe Digital Editions

After choosing a licensing option and successfully completing the purchase of an e-book through the University of Chicago Press shopping cart, you will receive an order confirmation and a link to download your e-book, as well as a link to Adobe’s Digital Editions software. The Adobe® Digital Editions software includes single-user digital rights management that requires the user to create an Adobe ID before accessing the content. Downloaded e-books from the University of Chicago Press can only be accessed by a single user ID, however up to six unique devices may be registered per ID, so you can backup, copy, or transfer digital content between devices. After the Adobe Digital Editions software has been installed and you have registered a valid ID with Adobe software, the content will remain accessible for the duration of your ownership period, even offline.


For further information on using Adobe’s Digital Editions software, please consult the Adobe’s Digital Editions FAQ.