Sharing Sony Connect Ebooks with my spouse

[slssr]

Both my spouse and I have a Sony Reader. We immediately set up our separate accounts on the connect store and took advantage of the $50 savings.

I had assumed that we could simply register each other's device in our respective accounts and thereby read each other's purchased books. This assumption was made considering you can have up to 6 devices registered.
Attempting to do that gave me a warning that the device was associated with another account, that the other ebook had to be de-activated from the other account, and something along the line that that device would no longer be able to read the books originally purchased under the de-activated account.

What am I doing wrong here? Could have sworn you could share ebooks in the same family.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[NatCh]

You should have registered both Readers on the same account in the first place, then both would be able to read all books from that account.

[slssr]

Ok........so, I guess it's best to let my wife read her 8 books she ordered, then deactivate her reader on her account and activate on my account.

Thanks for the info.

[NatCh]

Pretty much, yeah. If she ever wants to re-read those books, then she'll have to swap it back to the other account, or you could just leave it there and physically trade readers when you want to trade books, I suppose. Not ideal, but it might be managable.

[slayda]

Originally Posted by slssr

Both my spouse and I have a Sony Reader. We immediately set up our separate accounts on the connect store and took advantage of the $50 savings.

I had assumed that we could simply register each other's device in our respective accounts and thereby read each other's purchased books. This assumption was made considering you can have up to 6 devices registered.
Attempting to do that gave me a warning that the device was associated with another account, that the other ebook had to be de-activated from the other account, and something along the line that that device would no longer be able to read the books originally purchased under the de-activated account.

What am I doing wrong here? Could have sworn you could share ebooks in the same family.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Have you tried using an SD card, use connect SW to put her books on the card, move the card to your reader & then copy the books to your Connect SW?

[BobVA]

Originally Posted by slayda

Have you tried using an SD card, use connect SW to put her books on the card, move the card to your reader & then copy the books to your Connect SW?

The issue isn't moving it, it's reading it. A file DRM'ed for a particular Reader won't be readable on another one from a different account. Sort of like how purchased iTunes music can only be played back on an iPod associated with the iTunes account that purchased the file.

SLSLR: You might drop a line to the Connect Store help address and explain your situation. Perhaps they can kill one of your accounts after you deauthorize the appropriate Reader, then move all the purchases to your remaining account. Worth asking, anyway.

Cheers,
Bob

[slssr]

Well, thanks for all your inputs......hopefully lessons learned for others.

[atreis]

Glad I found this thread.... I bought one for me a few weeks back, and just bought one for my wife for Christmas. I'll have to make sure I register it in my account.

[melchioe]

BobVA has it right - Connect Support can move the content from the soon-to-be-deactivated account to the main account. They might resist at first, but insist to them that you will want the defunct account totally deleted, and eventually they will see the light and move them. They did this for me...

Since we are gluttons for complexity, we went one more and authorized two computers (my laptop and my wife's laptop) and both of our readers on the same Connect account. Now we can get all content on both Readers at the same time. It takes a little copying and moving to put it on the second PC, but it works OK. We're now up to 4 of the 6 potential authorized devices.

Once the initial download is done, it's not possible to download multiple books at once to the second computer. I've worked around that by transferring the titles from the purchasing computer to a Reader, then taking that Reader to the second computer and copying from the Reader to the computer - sorted by date, this works reasonably well.

With this method, we can buy books using either authorized computer and read them on either reader. This complexity would not be necessary if we simply had one central computer at home we used to purchase ebooks, but we both travel a lot and want to be able to purchase on the road.

[NatCh]

I'm glad they got it worked out for you, melchioe! Good news indeed.

[BobVA]

Originally Posted by melchioe

... we went one more and authorized two computers (my laptop and my wife's laptop) and both of our readers on the same Connect account. .

Just thinking about this, I have to admit for SONY it's a HUGE step. I can imagine the blood on the carpet at the meeting where this was decided.

FYI - if you purchase books they wind up in the My Documents/My Books/Connect Reader folder. I'm pretty sure you can just copy them to a USB drive, or fire them over the network to another authorized machine.

Cheers,
Bob

[SoCal Bob]

Originally Posted by BobVA

FYI - if you purchase books they wind up in the My Documents/My Books/Connect Reader folder. I'm pretty sure you can just copy them to a USB drive, or fire them over the network to another authorized machine.

Cheers,
Bob

That's not the issue. The DRM will not allow a book to be opened on a machine that is not authorized. Books on an SD card cannot be read in another Reader unless its on the same account that bought the book in the first place. So no matter how one gets a Sony Connect book into the Reader, they will only open on an authorized one.

[melchioe]

There's actually two issues, in my view:
1 - being able to read the content on two readers, but only purchase it once
2 - copying the darned things to the second reader - this will get to be even more of an issue when we have hundreds of titles (and we already have 50 or so purchased titles, and probably another 50 Gutenberg titles, and rapidly increasing as I format rtf files)

The first issue is now fixed for us -we have two computers and two readers authorized on the same account.

The second one will be a problem in time. And copying them via the My Documents/My Books/Connect Reader folder is not the best solution for me since the filenames are meaningless and the title is not available unless you open them in the desktop application.

[BobVA]

Originally Posted by SoCal Bob

That's not the issue. The DRM will not allow a book to be opened on a machine that is not authorized. Books on an SD card cannot be read in another Reader unless its on the same account that bought the book in the first place. So no matter how one gets a Sony Connect book into the Reader, they will only open on an authorized one.

Yes, that's what I meant when I said "to another authorized machine". Sorry if I wasn't clear that I meant one on the same account.
----------------------------

melchioe: What I do is sort the directory by date, so the most recent purchases will show up on the top.

If you right click the files, you can see there are fields for "Title" and "Author", but Sony isn't populating them. Might be worth dropping them a line about that

If I get a chance I'll try renaming a purchased file to a meaningful name and see what happens. If it doesn't break it, that might help you - could rename files as you purchased them, then you'd know which was which.

Cheers,
Bob

[melchioe]

Bob, you are absolutely right about the title/author fields. I already sent them a message about it, but I'm not holding my breath...

I tested renaming the files. It works, and the file is still readable on all authorized devices, but it's more work than copying through the first reader to the second.

To rename them, I had to:
- make a copy in different location
- delete the title from the reader (after I made SURE I had another copy), otherwise there are two titles in the Reader software
- rename the title
- drag the renamed title back into the Reader software

All in all, probably easier to copy from my Reader device to my wife's Reader software, and transfer from her Reader software to her Reader device.

I know I created my own pain, but with purchases happening on two different PCs at around the same time, or at least overlapping before I get around to synching them up, sorting the directory with the odd file names doesn't give me enough info to do that efficiently. Oh well. I'll have to play around with my sync software (AllwaySync, a marvelous, free program) to see if it can help me out. Add that to my list...

I guess I'd just like Sony to let me do multiple book downloads (or re-downloads) through the Reader software - then I'd grin peacefully and go back to reading. In the meantime, I'll simply live with it.