I want to like my Sony e-reader. I was one of the early adopters, which means I paid double what most of you paid so that I could get it a few months sooner. Yes. I’d have waited if I’d known the price was going to fall through the floor, but I’d been tracking e-readers since the Rocket e-book debuted in 2000, and I just couldn’t wait any longer. This was the future.
I’m no tree hugger, but hey, why cut down forests so that you can read a mystery novel once or twice, let it gather dust on a book shelf and leave someone else to throw it into landfill after you’re dead?
Content is king, and when I found out Sony was open source e-pub software and would have a e-reader store a la Amazon, I went for it. The problem is the Reader Store.
For the third time I’ve gone to the Reader Store, clicked on a promoted novel and been unable to load it because it’s “Unavailable in your territory.”
Worse, the first time I had clicked “Canadian Edition.” It took two days for Sony staff to figure out that it was a mistake and there was no available Canadian edition.
Today’s victim was “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” Susan bought it with her Kindle from Amazon.com no problem and recommended it. We debated whether she’d just loan me her Kindle, but it was easy to see that she didn’t want to part with the device for even a day. She’s an avid reader.
That’s how I ended up at Sony’s Reader Store today, and I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that Larsson’s bestselling novel was on sale for five bucks. Now I’d signed in to the store, so the software should have known my “territory.” But instead it just threw up whatever page is there for Americans, prominently featuring Larson’s novel.
So Sony promotes this novel to me but won’t sell it to me. Why do you make me so crazy? If it weren’t for the fact that Google e-books work on the e-reader, I’d be pitching the damn thing into the snow on my front lawn.
