NetLibrary (now Ebsco), Firefox and eBooks

Folks,

Many of you may have noticed that NetLibrary was purchased by Ebsco and all of our former NetLibrary eBooks are now linking from the opac into an interface that looks almost identical to Ebsco’s article database interface. Users must now click one additional time on “eBook full text” after arriving on the Ebsco search results screen.

The eBook launches within a window and pages of the book can be turned using arrows just as in other eBook platforms.  This seems to be working fine for PC users regardless of which browser they are using. Mac users will experience a seamless interface into the eBook if they are using the Google Chrome browser or the Safari browser.

But Mac users who are browsing with Firefox will see that only one page of the book loads at a time (outside of the viewing window) regardless of whether Preview or Adobe professional is being used to access the book. This is definitely a problem with Firefox being a fairly prevalent browser these days.  Hopefully we are not the only ones who will be giving feedback to Ebsco about this and we’ll see a solution forthcoming. I only discovered this when a faculty member contacted us over IM yesterday explaining the problem.

In the meantime, be aware of this problem that users may be experiencing and suggest that they use a different browser if having the “one-page-at-a-time” problem when accessing eBooks on Macs running Firefox.

thanks

Jeff