Digital editions

Enhanced open access editions

A number of our open access books are available to read online via the Manifold scholarly publishing platform. Manifold enables us to publish networked, media-rich, interactive versions of our book projects , offering authors and readers an innovative way of writing and engaging with texts.

For readers, the platform’s intuitive interface and functionality is designed to make the reading experience more interactive and collaborative. Tools such as annotation, highlighting, and participation in reading groups, improve and enhance a reader’s experience of our book projects and enable a deeper engagement with the texts. For authors, the platform allows you to include material which can’t be reproduced in a print edition of your book, as well as link a multitude of materials to the text, such as images, videos, source material, maps, appendices, interview material, raw data, drafts and other research materials.

We work closely with the authors of our enhanced open access editions to explore new ways of publishing humanities research, offering new models and a space for experimenting with what’s possible for open access publishing.

We’re excited to be able to use the platform to contribute to innovations in open research in the humanities, offering more collaborative, iterative and media-rich approaches to scholarly publishing. We also plan to share insights from both our publishing team and our authors reflecting on the publishing processes for key experiments in open access publishing, so that researchers and other publishers will be able to benefit and build upon our work.

Either choose the ‘Read online’ option for a particular title or visit our full catalogue of enhanced open access editions.

How to engage with our enhanced open access editions

Creating a free accoun t on Manifold will give you access to some of Manifold’s interactive functionality:

Reader view

Manifold’s main feature is the ability to read and engage with the text directly in your browser using the beautifully designed Manifold reader. You can navigate the contents using the dropdown in the top left of the reader, follow internal links (such as footnotes) or external links (such as citations), and interact with the text using methods such as highlights or annotations, outlined in more detail below.

Customisation

By clicking the font icon in the ribbon at the top right of the reader view, you can also change the appearance of the reader to suit your preference, including font type, light or dark mode, and the size of the margins.

Search

The reader view also has a powerful search functionality built into it that allows you to search a specific chapter or the whole project. You can also search from the project homepage or the Manifold homepage itself.

The full-text search will give you results broken down by project or chapter, including metadata, references and any additional annotations as well.

Highlight

Once signed up and viewing a text, you can select a passage of interest and choose to ‘Highlight’ it. Highlighting an extract will change the background colour of the text and add it to your notes section. Your notes can be accessed by clicking the note icon in the ribbon at the top of the reader view.

The highlight will remain in the reader view by default, but you can toggle the visibility of your highlights by clicking the eye icon in the ribbon at the top of the page and customising what is and isn’t visible.

Annotate

In addition to highlighting, you can also choose to annotate a text section. This will leave a note about that particular passage and can be accessed via the notes and comments page alongside highlighted sections.

Reading groups

By default, your highlights and annotations will be associated with the reading group ‘My Private Annotations’, which will be visible to you only. You can also comment publicly by assigning your annotations to the ‘My Public Annotations’ reading group. These will be visible to everyone who accesses this page, whether they are logged in or not. As with highlights, you can toggle the visibility of annotations to suit your preference.

In addition to the two default reading groups, you can create your own custom reading groups to curate a selection of texts and resources, and engage in discussions with other members of that reading group that you choose to invite. Comments will only be visible to members of the reading group. More details on how to set up your own reading group are available in the platform documentation.

Selected text sections can also be shared. Current options include copying citations in three different formats or posting a link to the relevant section via Twitter.

Starring

Projects can be starred by clicking the small star icon next to the title of the project, or a particular section of the text in the contents sidebar. Starred projects will appear on your my starred page, which will give you quick access to those projects and also allow you to receive notifications for activity related to those projects. You can also add projects to a reading group this way, drawing the reading group members’ attention to a specific project or chapter.

Notifications

Once signed up, you can change your notification settings (you must be logged in to do this) for projects that you have starred. Readers can set up daily or weekly email notifications for changes to a starred project, as well as replies to any comments you have made on a particular text.

Documentation

The functionality described above is explained in more detail in the Manifold documentation, so please feel free to explore that yourself, or get in touch with the UoL Press team if you have any questions not covered above.

New book projects

If you would like to discuss ideas and options for using Manifold’s features for your own project, please contact our Publisher, Emma Gallon.

Other formats

Many of our books are also freely available as PDFs. Any PDF editions of open access books are available to download directly from this website. Some of these PDFs are optimised for web viewing and have useful accessibility features, depending on when they were created. For more on accessibility, please see our accessibility statement.

In addition to PDFs, we also have EPUB editions of our books. At the moment, these are for archival purposes only and not currently distributed. If you would like to express interest in a book in the meantime, then please contact us.