Greetings from Upstate NY

[Theseus]

I'm an avid reader in rural, upstate NY, and I just got my first e-reader, a Sony Reader Daily Edition PRS-900, about 10 ten days ago. Glad to see there's a board on the Web for the e-reading public, and I hope I might get some good tips and info here.

My first 5 days with my new PRS-900 were marked by complete and utter satisfaction -- even elation -- with the product. The device seemed to meet my expectations in every respect, and then some. But then came Day 6, when I learned to my dismay that although the PRS-900 can display both ePub and PDF files, unfortunately you CANNOT annotate (mark up with highlighting, etc.) BOTH types of documents and expect the annotations to be retained in memory. I was 80% done with an ePub book which I had annotated extensively, but because I had also added a few annotations to a couple small PDFs I was working with, ALL of my careful annotations in the ePub book got deleted! They totally disappeared, and the ePub volume just froze up!

I contacted Sony customer assistance about this, and they replied saying, "I'm sorry to inform you that the ePub and PDF format books cannot be used in the Reader at a time. You should use either ePub or PDF in your Reader." What a huge disappointment!!

That completely contradicts SONY's advertising statement that "the Reader Daily Edition, supports Adobe® PDF3, Microsoft® Word, BBeB® and other text file formats" (www.sonystyle.com). SONY should state more truthfully that those formats maybe are all supported, but not at the same time on the same reader! The impossibility of utilizing the annotation function across multiple e-publishing formats is, to my mind, a SERIOUS design/programming flaw.

Sorry to use my intro post to rant like this, but this problem is still fresh in my craw, and I'm still trying to swallow it.

Any comments or ideas out there? I asked Sony if they might fix this problem through a future downloadable firmware update, but they never answered me on that. Thought about packing up the damn device and sending it back, but I'm loathe to do that and I'd lose some money anyway.

At any rate, thanks for listening.

[netseeker]

Hi Theseus, i'm sorry that you are facing such difficulties with your new Sony PRS-900 and can't help in this regard. Anyway, welcome to MR and enjoy the forums.

[Katti's Cat]

Hi Thesus & welcome to MR. Sorry I can't help you with the problem at hand but I wish you luck that you find a solution that satisfy you.

[cassidym]

Hi Theseus and welcome to MobileRead. Try posting your question in the Sony 900 section

[ShortNCuddlyAm]

Welcome to MR! Hope you get the problem resolved

[happy_terd]

Welcome to MR!!!

[Theseus]

Thanks everybody for the warm welcome. I did in fact post this situation in the PRS-900 forum as soon as I (being a newbie here) found that forum. So maybe some ideas will come out of there.

I'm using my new e-reader every day, actually, and liking it more, though I'm still frustrated about the limitations I talked about. I tried converting all my PDFs to ePubs using Calibre, but the results were inconsistent (sometimes fine; sometimes unreadable, depending on the complexity of the source PDF).

I'm thinking that it may be safe to keep the PDFs on my PRS900 along with my ePub files after all, as long as I only annotate the latter. I think the machine simply gets mixed up when you try to annotate both file types.

We'll see. Anyway, thanks for the input, and I hope to post again soon.