MS Reader ebooks - copying & reinstalling program and books

[michie]

Originally Posted by Jorgen

>FWIW I find the Palm DRM scheme intrusive and annoying - I dislike having to unlock each book.

Hear, hear! So I am not alone.

But you don't have to unlock each book -- just leave previously opened book on before opening a new book (i.e., don't close the current book, just go straight to "open"). It will use the same name and credit card number to open the new book. As a result, I only enter my name and card number once -- right after installation and never again. This is much less intrusive than MS Reader and Mobipocket. With MS Reader, I have to log-on and activate Reader with every installation. With Mobipocket, I'm unlucky enough to have a PID that changes with every hard reset -- so I have to register my PID and redownload all my ebooks. At least with Palm Reader, I can install it and unlock my ebooks without having to be online at all.

[michie]

Originally Posted by Jorgen

>FWIW I find the Palm DRM scheme intrusive and annoying - I dislike having to unlock each book.

Hear, hear! So I am not alone.

But you don't have to unlock each book -- just leave previously opened book on before opening a new book (i.e., don't close the current book, just go straight to "open"). It will use the same name and credit card number to open the new book. As a result, I only enter my name and card number once -- right after installation and never again. This is much less intrusive than MS Reader and Mobipocket. With MS Reader, I have to log-on and activate Reader with every installation. With Mobipocket, I'm unlucky enough to have a PID that changes with every hard reset -- so I have to register my PID and redownload all my ebooks. At least with Palm Reader, I can install it and unlock my ebooks without having to be online at all.

[Jorgen]

If you always use the same creditcard: true. However, in 1999-2000, I ended up using three different cards (supermarket lost a card during payment(!), re-issue never arrived) and PeanutPress after re-DRM'ing all the books screwed up my login and ended up ignoring my emails(!).

Jorgen

[michie]

That does seem like a problem -- however, it seems that it's really the customer service of PeanutPress that's the issue, not the DRM. If your login problems were resolved, it'd be easy to redownload everything to a single credit card number. Actually, for some reason, my ebooks use 2 card numbers right now -- but I keep one unlocked ebook of each on my SD card so that I don't have to re-enter the unlock info. Too lazy to redownload since having multiple card numbers doesn't really bother me.

[Jorgen]

>however, it seems that it's really the customer service of PeanutPress that's the issue, not the DRM

Very true! What they got out of it was that I have not bought a single book from them since 2000.

Still: to be able to read the books, I will have to maintain a PDA supported by the PDM reader. This is not a problem today but I could imagine I one day might buy for example a descendent to the Sharp Zaurus SL-C700.

Jorgen

[drop]

Peanutpress, now Palm Digital Media, allows you to reset the unlock key. I did it several months ago because I ditched my old credit card.

Activation is a bit inconvenient. However, the benefit of ebooks out weight the few seconds of activation.

I have no problem with any version of MS Reader.