Monday, October 06, 2008

Printing in NetLibrary

Eric Neubacher just alerted me to something that seems to be a change in NetLibrary. In the past, I recall that you could print 5 pages at a time from NetLibrary titles. Now, it looks like only 1 page at a time is allowed, as is clearly spelled out in the Help pages in NetLibrary:
Print and copy selections from a full-text eContent item. You are allowed to print one page at a time using your Web browser's print function or the print function on the Adobe Acrobat toolbar. Printing the entire eContent item violates copyright laws and precautions are taken to protect those copyright laws. If a suspicious usage pattern indicates excessive printing or copying, the activity is logged and you are sent a copyright warning message.
Am I mistaken about NetLibrary's past printing policy being 5 pages? Is 5 pages the rule for one of the other ebook services (Books 24x7 or ebrary?)

1 comment:

Stephen Francoeur said...

Yesterday, I emailed OCLC support to note the lack of detail in the help screens for NetLibrary regarding how to print pages. Here is the reply I just got from OCLC, which offers much more info than can be found in NetLibrary's pages:

We have 3 different eBook file formats, HTML, PDF's, and DjVu. The most common formats are HTML and PDF.

For non-PDF titles (HTML and DjVu): If you would like to print the full page of the eBook you are viewing, first select the page by LEFT-clicking anywhere on the page. This selects just this frame for printing. Next, click on File / Print from the browser menu. The print output will include only the text from the eBook page you selected, and includes the entire page. NOTE: The print output will not match the print preview.

If you are interested in other print options, Print Preview offers alternatives. First left-click to select the page to print. Then choose File / Print Preview from the browser menu. To print the NetLibrary eBook screen as it appears online, including frames, choose the option "As laid out on screen" from the drop-down menu. If you would prefer to print the eBook text frame, choose the option "Only the selected frame." Or, to print each frame on its own page, choose option "All frames individually." Note that these options print only the portion of the screen that is in view.

If the book is a PDF title, there is a printer icon off the Acrobat Tool bar which you can choose to print the page you want.