[ChristopherTD]

Bear in mind that you are only going to see posts from people where things have gone wrong. Very few are going to pop up and say everything is working fine! So the forums will necessarily present a skewed view of MS Reader.

Reader is by no means perfect, but it does work for a lot of people, including people with several devices.

So far my library of titles (some purchased 3 years ago) have weathered the activation/upgrade cycle of the last few months without hassle or need to redownload. It does need improvement but it isn't completely broken.

[ChristopherTD]

Bear in mind that you are only going to see posts from people where things have gone wrong. Very few are going to pop up and say everything is working fine! So the forums will necessarily present a skewed view of MS Reader.

Reader is by no means perfect, but it does work for a lot of people, including people with several devices.

So far my library of titles (some purchased 3 years ago) have weathered the activation/upgrade cycle of the last few months without hassle or need to redownload. It does need improvement but it isn't completely broken.

[mr_Ray]

Originally Posted by ChristopherTD

Bear in mind that you are only going to see posts from people where things have gone wrong. Very few are going to pop up and say everything is working fine! So the forums will necessarily present a skewed view of MS Reader.

Reader is by no means perfect, but it does work for a lot of people, including people with several devices.

So far my library of titles (some purchased 3 years ago) have weathered the activation/upgrade cycle of the last few months without hassle or need to redownload. It does need improvement but it isn't completely broken.

Oh I quite agree. If you paid attention to every complaint about a product you'd never buy anything.
Personal experience counts for a lot though - that's why I'll never buy Dell - and this has really put me off. I have a load of books that I can't read now (had they not been the free promotional books I'd be VERY unhappy by now).

For free and self made content I'll stick with uBook, and as KH suggested for purchased content I'll go with Palm Press Digital Peanut Media or whatever the heck it's called nowadays.

The real stinker for me now is that for my lost "free" eBooks I have to either
1) buy them - not likely since I had them for free last week.
2) become a hardened criminal mastermind by searching them out on Kazaa/usenet/IRC/wherever.

Another case of enforced DRM pushing someone towards "unofficial" channels. Nice one :roll:

[mr_Ray]

Well credit where credit's due.
MS, albeit 5x slower than they advertised, did solve this and have given me 3 more activations, and I can now read my old books.

It's stil lest a abd taste in my mouth, though, and is something for me to bear in mind in the future.

[davidspalding]

Originally Posted by mr_Ray

OK, this has got me quite upset now...

When trying to open Microsoft's free eBooks, MSReader on both my PC and PPC now say "The digital security software that protects this eBook has been updated. You must re-activate in order to open this title. Please go to (MS Site) for additional information."

After a couple of reinstall and re-activations on both, all of a sudden I have used all of my Activation quota. Hmm that's nice, but I thought that you could reactivate the same device as often as you liked without going over the quota?
Great. ConvertLIT, which I was trying out to prepare for just this eventuality, doesn't want to convert the files either, despite that the current install of Reader is up to date and saying that it's registered. I got v1.5 and same result.

I can get another activation from MS but being limited to one extra per 180 days doesn't help me when I have both a PC and a PPC that I want to read on. I was already halfway through HHGTTG, too. Bummer.

Any suggestions on where to go from here? :evil:

Hrm. I just tried with previously downloaded copies of the Joy Luck Club and Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy, and did NOT experience any such error. Tried with 1.5 and 1.4. <shrug> :?

I seem to recall seeing the Blackbox error when I didn't have the manifest.sig file in the same directory ... was was trying Convert LIT with someone else's secure book. At least with 1.4, you could only "DeDRM" a book which you were authorized to read.