[PLUG] Multnomah County Library Denies Linux Uses access to Download E-Books

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Thu Nov 3 02:22:18 UTC 2011


On Wed, 2 Nov 2011 15:58:07 -0700 (PDT)
dfhubbard at freegeek.org 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.



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