How do you cite a book in mla

Online Books & E-books

Online Books and eBooks: Not Quite the Same Thing

MLA makes a distinction between online books and eBooks:

• Online book: a book with a URL that you can access on a website or database like Project Gutenberg, Google Books, ProQuest Ebook Central, EBSCOhost eBooks, Early English Books Online, etc.
• E-book: "a book that lacks a URL and that you use software to read on a personal device or computer" (MLA Style Center FAQ); includes Kindle, EPUB, Nook editions.

Each is cited somewhat differently, although the core style elements still provide the basis for your citations.

Online Books (books with URLs or DOIs, accessed on the web)

• Author (Last name, first name).Title of Book. Edition (if available), Publisher (if available), Year of online publication. Name of Website or Database, URL (without the http:// or https://) or DOI number.
  • For most online books, you do not need to include an access date at the end of the citation, but you may wish to include an access date if you think the online book URL may not be stable or if you suspect the online book may be changed in the future.

Examples:

Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. Carmilla. 1872. Project Gutenberg. www.gutenberg.org/files/10007/10007-h/10007-h.htm.

Bell, Nancy. We Are Not Amused: Failed Humor in Interaction, De Gruyter, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:3447/lib/wsu/detail.action?docID=2035730.

E-books (books without URLs, accessed on an e-reader, e-reader app, or on your computer using e-reader software)

• Author. Title of Book. Name of e-book Edition. Publisher, Year of publication.

Example:

Gay, Roxane. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. EPUB, Harper, 2017.

Part of an Online Book or E-book

• Author. "Title of Book Part." Title of Book. Publishing info (if available). Page Numbers (if available and stable). Title of Database or Website where Book was Found. URL or DOI
  • Sometimes online books and e-books (for example, those we can read in PDF formats) have stable page numbers, but many online books and e-books don't provide numbers as print books do. Don't include page numbers if they are unavailable or device-specific.

Online Book Examples:

Osawa, Yoshimi. “‘We Can Taste but Others Cannot’: Umami as an Exclusively Japanese Concept." Devouring Japan: Global Perspectives on Japanese Culinary Identity, Oxford UP, 2018. Oxford Scholarship Online. www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190240400.001.0001/oso-9780190240400-chapter-7.

Henry, O. “The Fox in the Morning.” Cabbages and Kings, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1919, pp. 11-24. Google Books. www.books.google.com/books?id=zmcqAAAAYAAJ&dq=O.%20Henry&pg=PP10#v=onepage&q=O.%20Henry&f=false.
 

E-book Examples:

Bottigheimer, Ruth B. “A New History.” Fairy Tales: A New History. EPUB, Excelsior Editions/State U of New York P, 2009, pp. 103-15.

Access Date

 Works from the web can typically be changed or removed at any time, so while it's optional, the date which you accessed material is often important.  This is especially true when there is no date specifying when an item was produced.This date will be added to the end of the entry. E.g. Accessed 23 July 2016.

Authors/Editors

An author can be a person but can also be an organization, or company. These are called group or corporate authors.

If you are citing a chapter from a book that has an editor, the author of the chapter is listed first, and is the name listed in the in-text citation.

Dates

The format of all dates is: Date Month (shortened) Year. E.g. 5 Sept. 2012.

Whether to give the year alone or include a month and day depends on your source: write the full date as you find it there.

If no date is listed, omit it unless you can find that information available in a reliable source. In that case the date is cited in square brackets. E.g. [2008]

Page Numbers

Page number on your Works Cited page (but not for in-text citations) are now proceeded by p. for a single page number and pp. for a range of page numbers. E.g. p. 156 or pp. 79-92.

Publishers

You have the option to use the shortened name of the publisher by using UP instead of University Press (e.g. Oxford UP, not Oxford University Press).

You also have the option to remove articles (A, An, The), business abbreviations (e.g. Co., Inc.) and descriptive words (e.g. Books, House, Press, Publishers).

Titles

Capitalize the first letter of every important word in the title. You do not need to capitalize words such as: in, of, or an.

If there is a colon (:) in the title, include what comes after the colon (also known as the subtitle).

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