On Wed, 2 Nov 2011 15:58:07 -0700 (PDT) [email protected] dijo: >The Multnomah County Library has offered for 2 years down-loadable >e-books to every one EXCEPT those who use any form of LINUX!!! I have >just spent 5 hours in the library to learn how to download a library >book. Most of the time was with the branch supervisor, who spent a >lot of time on the phone to the libraries Tech Support people. The >final answer is "as long as you use LINUX you cannot use this service >of the Multnomah County Library"
I tried to do this just now to see what the problem was. First, bear in mind that the MCL has to pay very close attention to digital rights management. For example, if the library has bought digital rights to five copies of a book, only five patrons can have the book checked out at a time. In other words, you have to check the book out and check it back in when you are finished with it. This means that the copies are encoded so that they can only be opened in programs that respect the digital rights, i.e., that will stop letting you read the book after your checkout time has expired. Having said that, I recommend installing Calibre, an open source e-book reader. It will read Kindle, PDF and epub formats. You should find it in Ubuntu repositories. I called the Ask a Librarian line and got a very pleasant fellow who was helpful in explaining to me how the library's web pages for digital copies work. With his assistance I tried to download a Kindle book. When I clicked on Checkout I was suddenly taken to an Amazon page. I didn't follow through to check the book out, but bear in mind that you must have an Amazon account and log into it before you can download the book. I assume there would be no charge, since you would be downloading it as a patron of the MCL. Then I tried an Adobe digital media book. This popped up a download window, and I was able to download the file. However, what it downloaded was an .acsm file of just over 1K - nowhere near big enough to be a book. Calibre was happy to open the file, but didn't know what to do with it. It turns out that you are supposed to have Adobe Digital Editions installed on your computer, and then double clicking on the .acsm file will open it in Adobe Digital Editions. The librarian gave me a link to the download page for Adobe Digital Editions, but when I opened it in Firefox the Adobe page announced "sorry this software won't run on your computer." But the librarian insisted that he had information that Adobe Digital Editions would run on Linux. Acting on a hunch I went to winehq and checked the application database. Sure enough, all three current versions of Adobe Digital Editions have a platinum rating. I don't have Wine installed on my computer and I didn't want to install it just to test this. But it appears that you can install Adobe Digital Editions on a Linux computer via Wine, which will then allow you to read the book. I should add that I have bought Kindle books and they opened just fine in Calibre. But that was *buying* a book, not checking a book out of a library. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
