eBooks and downloading to mobile devices

Today I was full of enthusiasm for eBooks and using them on mobile devices. This was partly due to the Apple announcement yesterday about iBooks and partly because it has been on my 'to do' list for our developments. As a College we use eBooks a great deal - at LRC/e-learning/IT student inductions we show all students how to access eBooks through our VLE and their Athens account. We have two main platforms - Dawsonera where we buy individual books which are on reading lists or requested by curriculum staff and ebrary. Ebrary is the FE JISC collection and has proved very popular - our efforts at promoting the books and helping students to access them have paid off as we are consistently in the top 20 nationally of FE Colleges and often in the top 5. We have also recently acquired some Kindles and are promoting them with staff and learners - at the moment we have only uploaded fiction and other free books to them but are looking for suggestions of texts and PDFs of course materials.

So todays task was to work out how to download ebrary books onto my iPad which is possible so they say. Simple you may think but no, not really. I had already had Adobe Digital Editions installed on my work computer. I'd downloaded the BlueFire Reader App onto my iPad as I'd read that that was needed too. So firstly I accessed ebrary via Athens, chose a book and clicked on download. There is an option to download a certain number of pages as a PDF or to download the whole book for 14 days using adobe digital editions format so I chose the latter.

The download consisted of a small file which I then dragged into Adobe Digital Editions which then opened up the eBook. So far so good. I then found that I needed iTunes in order to open the file in conjunction with the BlueFireReader. First problem as we're 'not allowed' to have iTunes installed on our computers at work - this is to do with people having music libraries on the network I think.

So I went to our Information Services dept and asked if I could use the Mac that they have there. We do have some Macs in College in the VPA dept but in general they are not encouraged. So using the Mac I downloaded Adobe Digital Editions - it didn't show the ebrary eBook that I'd previously downloaded, not sure why but anyhow downloaded another and dragged the file in. I had to try it a few times as at first it didn't work. Then I opened iTunes and connected my iPad. I stopped it from syncing my iPad with the computer and then went to Apps and add new. It showed the BlueFireReader on the left handside. When I clicked add new I then searched in downloads for the file from ebrary/adobe digital editions and it appeared in the new box. Then on my iPad in BlueFireReader it showed the book. But when I tried opening it it just showed the cover of the book i.e. 1 page. So back to the documents file on the Mac and downloaded the file of the book too. It still didn't work. It seemed to be downloading it to the Mac but not releasing it into iTunes for the iPad. I tried it a few more times and managed again to download the cover page and finally the book or at least a file that was the right size for the book but it wouldn't open. The error was that the loan of the book wasn't valid.



It had taken me hours and hadn't worked - it must be easier than this.
This must work, it does work according to lots of websites and info so I'll try again at home and then at work.