Quote:
Originally Posted by Sallytrafic
As a complete newbie and struggling to come to terms with everything and this includes Sony that has decided not to be compatible with Apple (so I'm using Calibre), DRM just adds another layer of complexity.
I have no idea how to buy a book from Sony, if I did I have no idea if it would work on my reader as I'm not using library. Will DRM get in the way?
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In a word, yes. Back when I lived in Japan I bought myself a librie, which I gave my wife when we moved out. The idea was that this way she could still read in Japanese - supposedly a book was only a download away from the Japanese Sony store away. Unfortunately their drm tie the ebook you've bought to both the computer
and the librie through a windows only software that you have to use to download your purchase. And you could renew either a couple of times only.
When we tried it out, we used her old computer under windows, but we ditched it before leaving Japan for a laptop not running windows.
Where were we now? Both our computers are under linux so we needed to use a virtual machine to run the software, plus there was a glitch in the librie for which we had to send it back and use the warranty. This actually counted as having a new reader. For various reasons (among which very unclear instructions for somebody not very computer savy such as my wife, I couldn't read the Japanese involved) it became necessary to wipe and renew the virtual machines a couple of times.
WHAMMMO!!!
"You've exceeded your allowed number of renewal of the registering process. Please contact the technical team at..."
Fortunately, we have an IP phone (you can't do it through mail) and Japanese service is very good as a rule: it only took a couple days waiting to complete the process...
So let's see:
You're not free to use whatever works to access the store (here linux instead of windows) for completely artificial reasons. You need to phone home almost as soon as the renew any part of your gear.
Oh, I almost forgot. In a couple of months, the Japanese sony store for the librie is going to close down. That means that if six months from now we encounter a similar problem simply to upload already bought books from the computer to the reader, tough luck: we won't be able to renew the registering process because there'll be nobody to do so with anymore.