Ebooks: Accessing and Downloading Ebooks

When you are connected to the Rice wifi the site will not ask you to sign in through Ezproxy, but when you are off-campus this step is necessary to access texts.

After a certain period of inactivity, you will be asked to log in again.

If you are unsure whether or not you are logged in, you can check your URL, which should look something like this: www.example.com.ezproxy.rice.edu

The provider is asking me to sign into their system even though I already went through EZproxy authentication. Do I use my Rice net id and password?

• EBSCOhost: When EBSCOhost asks you to sign in, it is asking you to use an EBSCOhost account. You can easily create an account using your Rice email (this way your account is linked to Rice). Many users are understandably uncomfortable with this, in which case we recommend that you read the ebooks online (you cannot download the full text without an EBSCOhost account).
• ProQuest: When you try to add a book to your bookshelf or read the entire text online, ProQuest Ebook Central will bring up a pop up saying that it is directing you to Rice's sign-in page. Just hit the continue button and the window will either close or continue the process of adding your book to the bookshelf. Unfortunately this pop up also seems to take you out of the book you were reading, but once you click back to it you should be able to interact with it fully.

Most of our providers limit the amount of time you can have an ebook downloaded onto your device (typically ranging from 1-14 days). This requires you to install Adobe Digital Editions, log in with your Adobe account (you can get a free Adobe ID), and then finally download the book. If you sign in with your Adobe account/ID you should be able to transfer the book to another device (such as a Kindle or iPad).

Most of our ebooks have some sort of DRM restricting the number of pages you can print. The provider should give you a page count of the number of pages you are still able to print. The number of printable pages is normally dictated by a percentage of the overall pages (for example, some books might allow you to print 40% of the total number of pages). For some providers, this counter might reset after a few days. 

Generally, unless you are told to download a third-party app, when you choose to download an ebook by chapter (rather than full text) it will print to PDF, which can then be printed out. You can download an entire chapter or the pages you select. The one drawback to this method is that the number of pages you can download/print does not stack (if you have 100 pages available to download and 100 pages available to print, when you download a page both counters will go down to 99). ProQuest is one of the providers that make these seem like two different counters, but they are not (as the site cannot tell what you do with the pages you download, so they must assume you print them). 

In some cases (especially with ProQuest), the printing allowance will reset after 24 hours, allowing you to print out more of the book.

These downloading and printing restrictions mean that typically we recommend simply reading your ebooks online.