There are many reasons why an ebook you purchased is not showing in your eBooks.com account. This article will cover the most common causes:

Your transaction didn't complete properly, or it was held for some reason

If you are trying to access your ebook straight after purchasing, the ebook will only display in your bookshelf once the transaction is complete. Sometimes our payment gateway (the service that processes the payment), or your bank may delay completion of the transaction for some reason. If this happens the ebook will not appear in your account until the transaction completes.

If you can think this may be the case, you can check your emails to confirm. When an order is completed eBooks.com will send you an order confirmation email with your order / invoice number in it. If you have not received this email either your transaction has not completed, or it is the next possibility:

You made a typing error when you purchased and the ebook is in a duplicate account with a different username

This may seem unlikely as people are quite used to typing out their own email address, but this much more common than you would suspect. If your email was example@email.com but during checkout (or creation of your account) you accidentally entered wxample@email.com your order would still complete, but you wont have received the order confirmation email. And when you sign into your example@email.com account the ebook will not be there because it is actually sitting in your wxample@email.com account.

Thankfully this is easy enough to fix, but it involves our support staff merging the duplicate eBooks.com account in to your real eBooks.com account.

You purchased multiple copies, or as a gift voucher

If you accidentally selected the "Add to Cart" button twice instead of adding the ebook to your shopping cart as a normal purchase it will add the ebook as gift vouchers which are meant to be sent to someone else. The same thing will happen if you use the "gift" link to purchase the ebook.

In your account if you go to the Gift Vouchers & Bulk Purchases section, then if the ebook is visible here, then this is what has happened. The best thing to do is contact our support team and we can convert the voucher purchase to a normal purchase, which will make the ebook appear in your bookshelf. We can also refund any duplicate purchase if you accidentally purchased more than one.

A caching issue with your browser

Sometimes there is no issue with the website, but instead your browser has cached the My Bookshelf page and is not updating to show the new ebook for some reason. The best way to test this is to try opening an incognito or private tab in your web browser. Then sign in to eBooks.com and check your bookshelf. If the ebook shows up then this is the issue.

Normally to resolve it you can hold down Shift and click refresh in your browser. If this doesn't work you may need to clear your browser's cache.

You were given access via a voucher code and the voucher has not been redeemed yet

If someone sent you access to an ebook via a voucher code, you need to redeem the voucher in your account to deactivate the voucher and add the ebook to your account. If you created an account but haven't yet redeemed the voucher, then your bookshelf will be empty. To redeem the voucher please see this help article.

You were given access via another eBooks.com service

eBooks.com has some services it makes available to publishers that they can use to give access to ebooks (Digital Comps, Ebook Collections, Ebook Engine). None of these services require an eBooks.com account, and are accessed via a different login/account. If you suspect this may be the case for you please contact support letting us know who gave you access and we can let you know how to access your ebook.

You requested we remove the ebook from your account

Normally when you purchase an ebook from eBooks.com the ebook will be in your account permanently and cannot be removed, no matter what. Occasionally customers purchase an ebook, but then later contact us to request we remove it from their account. If you recall doing this but now have changed your mind, if you contact us we may be able to recover the ebook using the record of the original transaction.

The solution:

Regardless of the reason, to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, please complete our support form to submit a ticket to our customer support. Please confirm the title of the ebook that is not appearing. Please also supply the order / invoice number from your order confirmation email (if available). If you were given a voucher code, please quote the code in your message. We will then investigate and resolve the issue.