This is not quite off-topic, but skirts the edges:
I'm not at all au fait with all the technical alternatives for loading the software; I just find, having loaded it, that it is the most archaic, ugly, slow, cumbersome, hit-or-miss, amateurish program that I have had the misfortune to encounter in a long, long time. The MySpace page of an average ten-year-old looks more sophisticated than the eLibrary pages. It looks like someone spent a minute and a half drawing it on a piece of paper with their ruler and pencil, scanned it in and added purple to the lines and voila! Very attractive.
Then there is getting to the eBook store through it: most of the time it won't connect, just sits there with this enormous purple circle with a white arrow in it turning in the middle of the screen. For hours. There is no "Stop" function; you have to X the page and start again. Needing a stiff drink now before I can use the program, I'd like to be able to just go straight to the eBook store online via my browser, sign in and look at my account or purchase books. Can I do that? Nope. There is no login box if you go to the site via browser: if you want to log in you
have to access the store via the Library program (on those rare occasions it will make the connection). Trying to go to my list of purchased books in my account I generally end up staring at that infernal purple circle again for minutes before giving up in disgust. When I do get there, it throws me back to Page 1 of my booklist after every attempted download or check of my Library. Too bad that I was trying to download a book on Page 3 of my list and that's where I want to be.
Then the navigation of the site itself is bizarre: Click on "9 Free Books," expecting to be directed to, oh, you know, 9 free books, and you see four of them. Click on "Show All" and you go to ALL the sale books. I just want to see and download the Nine. Free. Books.
I thought I'd try to access books some other way - but of course Sony eReaders do not support Mobipocket, so there goes that idea.
It was lovely of my husband to buy the PRS-700 for me. Sadly, my experience of it so far has been nothing but frustrating, and I have asked him to return it as the process of getting books for it just makes me want to toss my computer (and the eReader) out the window. I'll wait until I can work out some way to buy a Kindle (being one of those leprous non-Americans not permitted to read US DRM books) so I can use Amazon to buy my books.
I keep thinking this is what happens when you get people who make televisions and Playstations to design a site for book people.
Possibly I am making some fundamental error and someone here (after rolling their eyes, shaking their head and making terse comments about my lack of tech know-how
) can give me the simple key to making this thing user-friendly. I just want it to work logically (or at all, really). I wanted to be able to use my eReader. I guess I just want it to be Amazon.com.
HR