On reverse engineering the Librie.
I got mine when I learned that BBeB supported non-DRM content. I quickly converted the hodge podge of tools from C, C++ and C# to Java so I could run them on my Mac. The day the unit arrived I had patched the Java tools to produce my first working BBeB on a Memory Stick in 1 hour.
I grabbed a Doctorow CCL'd novel (Someone Comes to Town...) and formatted it into BBeB with my Java publishing tool and submitted it back to him to add to his online catalog of formats. He appreciated the irony of his book being available on a platform that was so heavily DRM'd it became a symbol of how badly DRM can be abused by publishers (and thus lead to a failure of the platform.)
For me reverse engineering the Librie has been more about how to produce BBeB content than about how to re-build the OS. It was nice to get english but I was doing OK managing the unit in Japanese. What would have made the unit useless was no content.
Now Sony has finally taken my order and I await its arrival, several Baen novels formatted and ready. Will I have to tweak the catalog file format on the Memory Stick from that used by the Librie? The excitement of discovery is palpable for me.
