HI I am thinking of importing a Sony PRS-550 from B+H as recommended on this forum. As I am importing into the UK am I correct in assuming I will just pay the Dollar/Sterling exchange rate on the day ( today it works out to be £140 or $289) plus of course shipping costs and any customs duty this end. Or are there hidden costs ? This is my first electronic book and it appears to be quite a popular one. As I am going to be using a Mac I will probably have to use a virtual machine to run the connect software. One more thing has anyone with a mac tried this
http://labs.docudesk.com/latest-technologies/2007/4/26/docudesk-prs-browser-for-os-x.html

Thanks in advance for any replies

I've done this. Add about £40 to the seller's bill. You will have to pay V.A.T. and ParcelForce charge about £8 for collecting it and arranging the delivery (even if you pick it up from their depot).
But you don't need to pay any import or custom duties. The Sony Reader counts in the same category as a pda, so no customs duty is payable..
It's all worth it , in my opinion. I've saved a small fortune by curbing my Amazon habit. And I'm slowly reclaiming my storage space by converting public domain books.
See our book uploads section for a shed-load of free books in lrf format.

Funnily enough I am in South Wales too. When you say add £40 on to the sellers price, what does this cover ? I thought it would be a straight dollar conversion including shipping, and as mentioned in this group some people pay a charge this end seems to vary from £40 to £60. Or nothing if your lucky. Sorry if I see to be asking the same questions again.

If you buy a product from outside the EU, you have to pay VAT and (possibly) import duty on it. When the product is shipped to you by a courier service, the courier pays the taxes for you, and then sends you a bill (or you may have to pay on delivery); they'll generally add a £10-ish "processing fee" for doing this on top of the actual amount of the duties.

I've been using the Docudesk utility to transfer .lrf's (and other files) to the Sony Reader on OS X (Tiger) and it works great. Their free (for OS X users) pdf->lrf conversion utility is handy also.

If you're comfortable with the Terminal/Unix command line, you'll find Kovid's libprs500 package for OS X many more powerful utilities to manipulate/convert your various files (pdf, txt, rtf, html, lit, web sites to Sony's lrf format, modifying metadata, etc). There is a GUI which is working fairly well now, but it's still work in progress. Make sure you copy the libprs500.app to your Home directory before you run it for the first time (it seems to like running from there only, at least for me it did).

One nice thing about the Docudesk utility is that when it is running, the Sony Reader is mounted in your /Volumes directory so you can copy/delete/view files directly on the Sony Reader (cannot edit files on the Sony Reader directly it seems, just make a copy to your local working directory, modify it there and then copy it back) as it uses the MacFuse kernel extensions (makes the Sony Reader's rather funky filesystem readable to OS X).

Dave

OK thanks for that, I had completely forgotten about the VAT.

[QUOTE=DaveNB;120081]I've been using the Docudesk utility to transfer .lrf's (and other files) to the Sony Reader on OS X (Tiger) and it works great. Their free (for OS X users) pdf->lrf conversion utility is handy also.

I have seen the Docudesk utility and am pleased to hear it works so well, but I assume if I want to register the unit or buy books from the connect store I will have to use a windows machine or a VM running under OS X.