[JeePea]

I just received my Jetbook Lite today and after turning it on and playing with it a bit, flashed it to the .14k firmware from the .14i firmware that was on the machine. It flashed all right and then the rest of my evening slipped away. I spent several hours trying to understand why I couldn't get books I'd purchased from ereader.com to work on the Jetbook Lite. These are books I'd bought for another device but re-downloaded freshly for the Jetbook Lite. These ebook files require your name and a credit card number to open correctly. I installed these to an 8GB card I'd bought for the Jetbook Lite and then tried to open them. I entered my information, hit OK and then there was a flash and I'd see what looked like a very small image of the cover of the book and then I'd be at the main menu. So I'd work my way back to that book and try to open it again and get the same results. The book seemed to accept the required security information but wouldn't open. I tried this on half a dozen different books with the same basic results.

Finally, I decided to flash back to the original .14i firmware to give that a try and of course then the books opened. But they opened very slowly. I mean, the page count at the top of the page ran up at maybe two or three pages per second, which means it took a long time for a 400 page book. You can begin to read the book while the page counter rings up, but the paging is slow. Most annoyingly, the font size can't be changed either and the opening font is very small and thin, maybe 10pt. The font doesn't seem to be affected by trying to change the system font. If fictionwise.com is actively promoting the Jetbook Lite for their DRMed ebooks, why don't they allow for increasing the size of the font? Also, the green activity light flashes slowly the whole time I have one of these DRMed books open. It doesn't do that with non-DRMed books.

I didn't try ebooks directly from the Barnes and Noble site when I had the .14k firmware installed because I don't want to buy them if I'm not sure they don't work on the Jetbook Lite and from what I've read, they still don't work on this firmware. I really wanted to report a positive experience when flashing to this new firmware, but it turns out I'm not even very happy with the older version when it comes to DRMed ebooks. I'd like to hear other people's experiences with DRMed books on the Jetbook Lite using either of these latest firmware versions because maybe I'm missing something.