Ebooks offer two major benefits to the academic researcher:  the ease of accessing the texts themselves, and the ability to keyword search within the texts. 

In the library:

Use the Summit Catalog or the OSU Libraries Catalog to discover our collection of electronic books.  You can read them on your computer, or transfer them to a variety of devices.

On the web:

Project Gutenberg.  Project Gutenberg is a repository of more than 33,000 texts on a variety of subjects.  Most of the books are in the public domain because their copyright has expired; the number of current texts in this repository is relatively small.

Google Books. Working in partnership with several libraries, Google has digitized millions of in-copyright and out of copyright books.  Your access to these books will vary: some are available in full-text, some provide substantial preview views, and some provide only snippet (sentence-length) views.  You can find the books in libraries, purchase them, or view the available portions online.