[Genre fan]

I just had the same frustrating problem as several other annoyed Kobo customers lately: unable to download a book because there is no download option once the book is in My Library (see several other recent threads about this problem). Since the Sony Reader store closed about 8 months ago, I've purchased about 70 books from Kobo without having encountered the Kobo kepub DRM nightmare. For 2 of the books that I bought less than 24 hours ago, there was no download option once the books were in my library. I contacted Kobo after signing out and signing back in again (as stated in the FAQs as the solution to such a problem), got a ticket number and an email telling me that I had to call Kobo to deal with it.

So this afternoon I called Kobo at the number they gave me in the email and in the webpage response to my "contact us" query. As I called and waited on hold, I logged on to my account via my computer browser to see if an option for downloading the book had magically appeared --- and found that the Price Had Dropped $4 overnight!! for one of the books (Michael Connelly's The Burning Room --- and still no download option for any of the affected books.

Then I have to deal with the guy telling me that I should have known (HOW was I supposed to know this???) that I can only get books for my Sony e-reader if the details page has a logo showing that the book can be read on Blackberry devices, and hey, no trouble, I can just read it on my computer with the Kobo app (while trying to instruct me in downloading the silly program that I already have and hate as much as I hated the Sony reader app). Not only that, the customer rep also insists that I have to send him a screenshot to prove that the website now says the price for the book I bought 12 hours ago is $10.99 instead of $14.99 so I can get credit (not a refund?) for the $4 plus tax that I was (over)charged yesterday. By the end of the phone call, he hadn't received my response email with the screenshot, he insisted that I should use the Kobo app to open the book to see if I could use it, I still had neither of the books, no download options, and no money back.

Grrrrrr! The whole point of having an e-reader is ease-of-portability and for my eyes not to be tortured by backlighting! The last thing I want to do is try to read an entire book on my computer! A short story, I can deal with, but I don't like it. A whole book? I don't care if the book works in their stupid app! I don't care if the book works on an iPhone, iPad or android device! I don't want to read books on backlit devices!!! I want to read them on my e-ink readers that I've used every single day for the last several years! I want to download my books so that I can back them up and never lose them! I want to actually own the copy of the books I've purchased!

I looked at all the other 700+ books that I purchased from Sony and Kobo and found that there is one other book that I bought from Sony without a download option. Fortunately, I have that one backed up on my computer and my 2 e-readers. But still...

I hate that the technology has changed enough that the e-book stores are moving to wireless-only and cloud-storage interaction rather than download and side-loading. It looks like they're working even harder to make sure that the books will only work with their proprietary devices. My perfectly wonderful Sony Daily Edition prs-950 and Pocket Edition prs-350 can't work with any of the vendors if they all eliminate the download options (as B&N just did; thankfully I only had 6 books and 1 magazine there). Who cares if the books are still in my account library, supposedly forever, if I can't use them?

What is all this Cr@p of moving to all backlit devices anyway? Arghh!!! Am I the only one left in the world who doesn't want to spend my time looking at a backlit screen? I read about 1 book per day, buy about 300 books per year or more, plus I read library books, of which about 2 per month are downloaded ebooks. I am a Really Good Customer and will continue to be one if they will just quit with the restrictive tagging and code wrapping. I started buying ebooks because the ~10,000 books I have in paper have filled up my house and I have no more room. My husband was agitating to get rid of the physical books, but now I can't possibly see that as an option unless I go blind or we have no choice because they are destroyed by fire or flood.

Another rant: if the books I want to read were all actually available from the public library, I wouldn't need to collect them in the first place! I like to read series of my favorite authors over and over, mostly genre books. I like to read all of the books in order, not numbers 2, 3, 7, 10, and 11 that are the only ones of a 13 book series that the local library has purchased. What good is it to have any of the books if you can't get the remainder of the series to get the whole story? It's even worse with ebooks because the library has fewer of them.

sigh. And I know the batteries in my beloved e-readers are going to die sooner than I'd like, which will force me to deal with getting a new device and the only options available to me in the USA are readers that are locked into a particular vendor.

For those helpful folks who are going to suggest that I use certain not-to-be-named DRM-manipulating applications to import the files from the Kobo app library folder to calibre: I have a Mac and see no way to use the plug-in that was suggested (and deleted from) several other posts in various threads. I've spent the entire evening trying to figure out how to do it and I have no answer yet.
Any Mac users out there with a solution?