Help! Adobe ePub and my 505

[thesweetone]

Good Morning All,

So I've had my PRS-505 for about a month and I love it! I was able to load the ebooks that I had on my MAC on to it via Calibre and I made one purchase from the Sony eBook store, book 1 of a 3 book series.

This weekend I finished up that book and wanted to purchase book no. 2. Well for some reason, the Sony store only carries books 1 and 3 of the series, so I had to go somewhere else for book 2. I found the book at www.ebooks.com and proceeded to make my purchase.

The book was available in 4 formats:

ePub for Digital Editions
PDF for Digital Editions
Mobipocket Reader
Microsoft Reader

I couldn't decide between the ePub or PDF for Digital Editions. I should have come here and looked for help before I purchased. I purchased the ePub for Digital Editions version and have not been able to open the book once I transferred it from my Mac to my 505. It opens fine on my Mac in both Digital Editions and Sony eLibrary.

I searched around on the web for some help and discovered that there are issues with Macs, DE, and Adobe ePub books. Part of the problem is that I can't authorize my 505 on the DE app on my Mac. When I open up DE with my 505 plugged into the MAC it doesn't recognize it. On an Adobe message board, I saw where one person was able to authorize the 505 on DE on a PC then the next time they plugged their 505 back into the MAC, they were able to copy the Adobe ePub book from its location on their hard drive onto the 505 and they had no problem opening the book after that.

So I tried that. I brought my 505 into work where I use a PC, downloaded DE to my desktop, authorized DE with my adobe account, plugged in my 505 which DE recognized, and authorized the reader for DE. When I got home, I plugged my 505 into my Mac and attempted to copy the book from my hard drive onto my 505. I'm still unable to open it.

Any thoughts on what I can do next? Also, to avoid this problem in the future, when I'm purchasing ebooks outside of the Sony ebook store, what format should I get? Thanks for your help and sorry for the long post.

[ruth1304]

Did you redownload the book after all the authorization problems had been resolved? That may help.

I would recommend epub, and once you've sorted out the authorization problems it should all work quite smoothly. I use a pc but it still took a few tries to sort it out, but I haven't had any problems since.

[thesweetone]

Originally Posted by ruth1304

Did you redownload the book after all the authorization problems had been resolved? That may help.

I would recommend epub, and once you've sorted out the authorization problems it should all work quite smoothly. I use a pc but it still took a few tries to sort it out, but I haven't had any problems since.

Thanks Ruth!

I have not redownloaded the book. I will try that when I get home. Thanks for the suggestion.

[kenmark]

Someone else had a 'somewhat' similar problem here. Hope this may help. Try redownloading the ebook as suggested above first.

[thesweetone]

I ended up having to strip the DRM to get this book onto my 505. I know that stripping is frowned upon, but hey, I paid $14 dollars for the book and was not about to let my money go down the drain. Once I got rid of the DRM, I was able to convert the file in Calibre and get it onto my reader.

Will I continue to strip? Probably. Why should I have my collection limited to what's available in any one eBook store? I'm paying for these books and I'm not sharing them. I just need to be able to get them on to my device. I have no intentions of having several different readers just so I can get access to all the books I want to read.

[radius]

Originally Posted by thesweetone

I ended up having to strip the DRM to get this book onto my 505. I know that stripping is frowned upon, but hey, I paid $14 dollars for the book and was not about to let my money go down the drain. Once I got rid of the DRM, I was able to convert the file in Calibre and get it onto my reader.

Really? Around here, I get the impression that stripping DRM is encouraged!

Since you have a 505, it can already read epub books so there is no need to reformat the de-DRMed book using Calibre (unless you want to change the formatting using Calibre)

For commercial books -- other than Baen's -- I usually find that I have to make the margins smaller and text slightly larger for comfortable reading.

[kelly1010]

Originally Posted by radius

Really? Around here, I get the impression that stripping DRM is encouraged!

Yeah sometimes it does seem like that. I prefer to take the easy way and shop at websites that are compatible with my ereader. I'm too lazy to figure out how to strip drm, and I have better things to do than spend time doing that, when there are plenty of websites where I can download the book right to my reader. I could use that extra time to READ!

[grimborg]

Avoid drm, my friend!