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Reading lending library books on the Nook

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Our lending library books now work on the Nook!

If you can read online, try the ‘Read In Browser’ link on a borrowable book. This is simplest!  Otherwise, you’ll need a computer, with Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed.

Once you have ADE, here’s how to use it with your Nook:

  • Quit Digital Editions, if it’s running
  • Plug in the Nook, and start ADE
  • ADE should recognize the Nook, and offer to associate with it. Make sure you can see the Nook under ‘Bookshelves’ on the left. Ok!
  • Go to the borrow page and borrow a book in pdf or epub format.
  • If ADE is working properly, you should see your book!
  • Next, go to ‘Library View’ in ADE – in the upper left.
  • In the Library View, drag your new book over to the Nook icon under ‘Bookshelves.’
  • Quit ADE and eject your Nook.

To read on the Nook:

  • Go to your Library (on a Nook Color, do this by touching the bottom of the touchscreen)
  • Go to ‘my files’ – at the top – and open ‘Digital Editions’
  • Open your book! (if it says ‘sorry, can’t open this book’, try again.)

To return your book early so that others can borrow it:

  • Quit ADE if it’s running
  • Plug in your Nook and start ADE
  • Open ‘Library View’ and click ‘All Items’ on the left
  • On your book icon, there’s a drop down menu (a little triangle) in the upper left – select ‘Return Borrowed Item’
  • Open the Nook, in the bookshelf area on the left.
  • On your book icon – select ‘Return Borrowed Item’.
  • Your book should now be available to borrow again!

If you run into trouble, here’s a forum on the Barnes and Noble site about how to get ADE working with the Nook.

KohaCon 2011

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Anand and I attended the Koha Conference in Thane, Mumbai earlier in November and spoke about Open Library. The conference took place from Oct 31 till 2 November. There was a hackfest following the event from 4th to 6th.

We missed the first day and presented our talk on the second day of the event. The first day had a number of interesting talks mainly about libraries shifting to Koha and about deployment issues. We spent our free time speaking to Robin Sheat, Dobrica Pavlinu i and Ian Walls among others about ways to tie up the Open Library data along with Koha installations. While the audience was somewhat small, it was truly international. There were folks from Kenya, Nigeria, France, the States, New Zealand, Australia, Croatia and of course various parts of India. We also met Savitra who apart from being a Koha developer, runs a Bangalore based company called OSS labs that provides hosted Koha instances for libraries.

We presented on the last day. Our slides are available at http://internetarchive.github.com/kohacon2011-presentation/. It was an introduction to Open Library, the data we have and some discussions on the API. There were a few questions mainly about copyright issues and about the classification system we use on the website. The conference was attended by many librarians and two of them (The Institute of Management Studies Library at VPM Thane and the University of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Croatia) have applied to join the Open Library Lending Library program.

After the presentations, November 3rd was a day off and we spent it wandering around the older parts of Mumbai. On November 4th, we went back and spent the morning brainstorming about ideas to implement. We came up with a few

The first is a simple database update that presents OL as a search option when a book is not found while searching in a Koha installation. It’s been done and signed off.

The second was a simple Javascript change that fetches covers and borrow information from Open Library and then presents it when searches are done on Koha. This has been implemented as well.

The third is the most involved part and we have started work on an API to upload covers to OL which can be used by any external program. We have also started work on an API for Koha to search our records to see if the book being added is already in our database (in which case, it can auto complete the details for them). The search will also return the cover if it exists. On our end, if the koha side agrees, we can populate our database with the catalogue record being searched for and if a cover is uploaded, we can get a copy of that as well. This means that if a Koha instance in one library has uploaded a cover, other libraries will be able to use it. On the Koha side, Robin has a private branch that contains the work in progress. Details are in the bugzilla entry.

We’re following up on the bugs and the lending library requests to join. On the overall, it was a wonderful event and one that benefited Open Library as well as Koha.

Our Search Engine Was Hurting

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Sorry to say, but our search engine is all kinds of weird this morning (San Francisco time). Lots of the pages you see around the site, like a Work page or a Subject page, or indeed the Search Results page are driven largely by search.

So, while we’re working on fixing the problem, please excuse the various gaps you might encounter around the place as we resolve it.

Update, 12:50pm PST: We’ve tried running Lucene CheckIndex on the work search index, but it came back with “No problems were detected with this index.” Hmm. Next, we’ll try restoring from backup. Apologies again for the continued oddness around the site!

Update, 2:30pm PST, 7/13/11: OK. We’ve just removed the site alert that you might have noticed across the top of every page, because we think the search is back up online. It turned out that we had to rebuild the whole index from a 2-day-old backup, and then process the last 2 days of changes made on the site into the new index. Phew! If you continue seeing weirdness or results that look less correct than usual, please let us know.

Apologies again for the road bump – and a word of advice? Be sure to keep an eye on how and where your log files are being stored, and accumulated. Turns out it was a huge blob of log files is what ended up choking our search engine, stopping it from being able to be updated. We’ve since modified where we store logs, and how often they are cleaned out.