[ux4484]

So.....I'm not a big MSReader fan (I'm mostly iSilo/ubook), but I did opt for all the MS free downloads this summer/fall which did certainly get me using MS reader more than I ever had before. The titles were great, and MSReader has been the only reader open (for books) on my PDA because of the promotion.....but only BECAUSE of the free books.

I can live with MSReaders limited feature set (compared to iSilo, Palmreader, and ubook) for this crop of books. But things would be different if I were paying for these books, not all of them.....just the one published by Rosetta.
My experience in reading these books on my Axim has been close to punishment in terms of speed and resources. The latest Rosetta title I'm reading: "The Blind Assassin" takes almost two minutes to open (even at full speed after a soft reset), it then takes another minute to go to the "furthest read" page from the books own title page. I had been storing these books in either the built in storage, or my SD card to conserve space, but of late I've been putting the currently read title in system memory.....and even then, the speed gain is only a few seconds. Besides the crawl to open the books, I've discovered another bug.....When you have a Rosetta ebook open (this does not happen with open source material or other DRM publishers books) eventually you will not be able to open your contacts.....I work around this by leaving contacts open all the time (old habit now). I really shouldn't complain because they were free, but HAD I PAID for these titles, I'd be fit to be tied! If this is an example of how Rosetta's .lit books typically work, I can honestly say I'll never buy one, no matter how much goodwill they try to spread by giving free ones out.

After about the third or forth title I experienced this with, I considered using "that" utility to strip the DRM and convert it to another format to make it better, but decided it was against the spirit (among other things) of MS's free promotion (which was to get you to use their reader more). I haven't crossed that line (and don't intend to), but If something I paid for worked this poorly, and the provider wasn't doing anything about performance issues.....I can see why some folks would.

Rosetta should fix this.