Using the ebrary Reader on Linux
5 March 2006
Apologies if you have no connections with a university or educational institution. This may be of less interest to you.
Please use PDFs and other open standards!
Academic articles and books are funded by the state, given to publishers for nothing or almost nothing and then bought back by the state in a bizarre dance.
Most of these publishers give out academic works in PDF, a recognised Open Standard that works on all platforms and multiple applications.
Using an open standard like PDF means that academic users can use whatever software and hardware that they want. In my opinion it is important for public institutions not to be anti-competitive and to not collude with monopolies and cartels.
Sadly this is being undermined by an increasing use of proprietary formats. Today I had to use one such format.
ebrary
PDFs are very handy, I can download a few PDFs and then later read offline on my laptop. On a plane or in the park or whatever.
Ebrary is a proprietary (and "patent-pending") extension of the PDF format that is used to distribute electronic texts. Over PDF it adds nothing useful to me, the end-user, but it seems to be about making it very difficult to use.
Not only can you only read one page at a time, ruling out my chance of fresh air and freedom from the computer room; it also requires a proprietary browser plugin, which - have you guessed already? - requires Windows.
Terms of Service
I looked up the Terms of Service. While I am not a lawyer, the main technical stipulation was:
> "You must interact with the site manually, using a Web browser and the ebrary Readerâ„¢ software."
They are of course getting confused and mixing up their metaphors, there is nothing manual about using a web browser or a graphical viewer, it is all virtual and automated! The main thing is that the Terms of service do not rule that I have to use Windows.
Wine to the rescue
I am not suggesting that you just drink a bottle of red and forget all about it, although that is an option. Rather I am talking about the open-source implementation of Windows, called 'Wine'. Wine runs on top of Linux and makes your machine compatible with Windows binaries, with no discernable performance hit.
Below is a screenshot of the ebrary reader running on Wine:
- `.. image:: http://commandline.org.uk/images/posts/ebrary/ebrary_on_linux.png
-
alt: Ebrary on Linux
`_
How to use ebrary on Linux `Permalink`_
The following was done using 64bit AMD Gentoo Linux. Since it worked on 64bit it certainly should work on the normal 32bit versions (32bit is far less fussy than 64bit).
- Install Wine.
Firstly you need to install Wine, refer to you distribution's own documentation for how to do that. On Gentoo, you type:
emerge wine
- Install Firefox or similar
Secondly you need the web browser that they were talking about. Mozilla explicitly allows you to install their software on Wine, so I used Firefox. Grab the .exe file from the Firefox website and 'open it' with wine:
wine Firefox Setup 1.5.0.1.exe
This launches the Firefox setup program, press next a few times. Handily, Firefox automatically created a desktop shortcut for me on my Gnome Desktop.
- Install ebrary reader
Next you need to grab the .exe file from the ebrary website. If you downloaded it using your new Win32 Firefox then you can just open it from within the Firefox Download Window, otherwise you must type
wine ebraryReader.exe
If you have Firefox open then you should close it and then re-open it to load the plugin.
- You are done
From now on you can follow the instructions provided by your institution. I am in the UK so I had to sign into Athens and then head over to the ebrary website.
I can now happily read ebrary books, but still just one page at a time...
1 Phill says...
Good post, Zeth! Just one point though - PDF is a proprietary format, i.e. I believe Adobe have the copyright on it. However, they sensibly realised that a 'portable document format' is nothing if only people who have proprietary software will read it. Hence they publish the specifications.
Anyway, I'm currently downloading wine - I want to give it a go! Would be interesting to use some old windows apps on Linux...
Posted at 1:23 p.m. on March 5, 2006
2 Zeth says...
Well yes proprietary in the sense that Abode basically do their own thing with the development of it, but non-proprietary in the sense that anyone can use it without royalty or permission. The only limitation is that a PDF writing program has to make standard-compliant PDF files in order to use the trademark PDF - i.e. it has to actually work.
A certain type of PDF, called PDF/X, is an ISO standard (see http://www.pdfsolutions.co.uk/pdfx.htm ). This is an open standard.
My only problem with PDFs is that the file-format is not very tidy, with lots of binary rubbish for no good reason. The ODF is much cleaner in that regard as it is all human readable.
With file formats, the copyright is not really a problem, e.g. ODF is copyright someone (Sun/Oasis), but rather the licence and patent conditions.
If you go and make your own ebrary reader for Linux, the company may try to sue you. I think that would be anti-social, anti-competitive and immoral behaviour for them to sue you, but they might do it anyway.
Therefore, I think we should concentrate on making our own books and articles that we can share freely with everyone, not only if they are selfish Windows- using rich westerners with expensive logins.
I want everyone in the world, regardless of income or nationality, to be able to share in education. What we have now, where everyone can get to the door but only some can enter (i.e. the white colonialists), is a new global racism.
In a world-wide-web; we should not put up with or collude with this new discrimination.
See http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html for more about the open access movement.
Posted at 3:15 p.m. on March 5, 2006
3 Luke says...
PDF used to be a major hassle for me, now it's subsided to a minor hassle. Why can't people just stick with scrollable text and html? (shudders at the thought of ever having to use ebrary)
Posted at 3:09 a.m. on March 19, 2006
4 Zeth says...
Yeah I do not understand that either, especially when the economics of the current system seem so loopy and unprofitable that all this non-functional copy protection is just another cost in a big loss-making torpedo, supported by the taxpayer, of course.
'Crossover' is the supported version of Wine, i.e. that you can buy rather than download for free, or something like that. Something I found since writing this article is that CodeWeavers, the company that sells Crossover, has a Compatibility database. It lists the ebrary reader as a "Bronze application":
> The bronze is awarded to applications that install and run, and that can accomplish some portion of their fundamental mission. However, bronze applications generally have enough bugs that we recommend that our customers not depend on their functionality.
So buggy that you cannot depend on its functionality, are they talking about the whole ebrary reader or just running it on Wine? ; )
Posted at 3:47 p.m. on April 9, 2006
5 Chris says...
I found the comments regarding ebrary, Acrobat and the PDF file format interesting and thught I would try to clarify some points:
process or Read and display the PDF file.
covered by Patents held by Adobe or other Companies. i.e. images the .gif format, how font substitution is handled.
The ebrary Reader, under closer evaluation, does offer some advantages over the Acrobat Reader. For instance: - You may view a large file (over 100MB) over a modem, without having to downlaod the whole file. - If you copy text, you get a complete bibliographic citation, with link back to the copied document. - The ebrary Reader supports highlighting in three colors, which I find useful for research - the user may manage the annotated information from a user's Bookshelf. - Through InfoTools, the user may cross-reference information efficiently.
ebrary and the Adobe Reader serve different purposes, I suppose it would be better if ebrary also allowed the user to download the book, but if the publisher's then required some draconian Digital Rights Management, would that be better?
Posted at 6:50 p.m. on May 2, 2006
6 ebrary says...
http://www.ebrary.com/kb/users/linux_under_wine.jsp
Posted at 10:49 p.m. on February 15, 2007