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Any one got one?
I thought it may free up a bit of shelf space.

I have a Sony e-reader the basic 300 range as I didnt want anything too technical. Just pick up and read. I am absolutely delighted with mine and no longer need to find space to store books!!

How does the cost of downloads compare to paper books from Amazon?

Can you swap books with your friends?

Russell.

To date (although Im sure its a breach of copyright) I have bought all my CDs which you then download to the reader from ebay. The last lot I paid about £11 for 2,000 books. If you go through the official channels it is quite price.

Hello,

I have had my Sony reader for 18 months.

I have some reservations but can see the advantage, especially when travelling with just hand luggage (although on Ryanair they wouldn't let me switch it on until the fasten seatbelts sign went off in line with other battery operated equipment....)

However, I have only ever bought through Waterstones (Sony has a link to them for copyright reasons) and I have been disappointed with the choices available and the prices (and the layout of the Waterstones site but that may just be me being fussy!). But things are improving I believe with more titles/authors all the time.

For the reasons above I hadn't actually used my Reader for some time, till I decided to download some books for my holiday in Amelie earlier this month. Unfortunately I seem to have forgotten what to do! I have bought a book, downloaded it to my pc but can't get it on to the device in the same way I had done before...can anyone help?

Many thanks,

Nicki

I am afraid I am a bit hit and miss when I load my books and cannot give technical instructions basically I download the CD onto my laptop then open up reader icon and plug in machine. I then click on something that shows the books on my laptop and copy and paste. Sorry thats probably not a bit of use to you. I think its something to do with the fact that I was born in the manual typewriter age and manual turn the handle copiers with purple ink that smudged everywhere on the shiney paper!!

Sue wrote:To date (although Im sure its a breach of copyright) I have bought all my CDs which you then download to the reader from ebay. The last lot I paid about £11 for 2,000 books. If you go through the official channels it is quite price.

Most of these CDs are full of books on which the copyright has expired so there is no problem. You can download 100s of thousands of them at http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Russell.

Many thanks for the tips....I think the problem might be that, as my Sony Reader is 18 months old, something important has already been updated.

I have looked at the 'help' section for transferring books on to my device and it seems there has been a 'firmware' upgrade. I have tried to download this upgrade but still no luck. I suspect everything is very straightforward but I am seriously out of my depth here!

I may have to stick to the old fashioned way of reading.....

Nicki

I have a Sony eReader Touch which I just love. Ok - nothing replaces a real book, but for travelling it's wonderful. I buy the books from WHSmiths online. The selection is improving by the day & if you are prepared to wait a few months (ie not buy new releases) they can be much cheaper than buying the paperback version.

That said, I still prefer the real thing when I am at home.

I'm looking at getting a Kindle as the screens are better than any of the eBooks I've seen so far.

BUT

Does anyone know if the UK version is different from the international one? Is there some setting that makes downloads more, or less, expensive or is there some IP address blocking issue like IPlayer?

I have the Kindle 3 ( sold its predecessor Kindle International so that I could upgrade) and love it. I have the entire works of Dickens, Shakespeare and Lee Child on it . I usually descend on the PO in the summer and Michael O'Leary penalises me gravely for my habit of lugging 25 books to Sorede for the lecture estivale. That is what moved me to buy the Kindles. At first, I didn't like the plasticky experience and the limited choice of books-- can you imagine a bookshop that does not stock "The Leopard", by Giuseppe di Lampedusa ? But I can get books free from manybooks or from Gutenberg and I use Calibre to classify them and to convert them to the format used by the Kindle. Because it uses 3G and wifi, I can download books anywhere, which takes ten seconds tops. It is true that the publishers, terrified that book publishing will go the way of the recording industry have organised a cosy deal with Amazon which means that ebooks are scarcely any cheaper than dead tree books, but the sheer convenience of the process and the ease of having a 500,000 volume English bookshop at your fingertips as you roast at Le Racou or freeze at Font Romeu more than compensates. I see from the back cover of Sunday's "Observer" that you can get the latest Kindle for £149. That is not a bad deal. There are also plenty of the previous model on eBay very cheaply, and they are perfectly good if you don't need wifi. Go for it.

I'm sold on them, I just want to know why the same book downloaded from the US site is 3 times more expensive than from the UK site and whether the formats of the downloads and the Kindles are different.

Amazon have a kindle at £109 wifi only and £149 wifi and 3G

Thanks but the puzzle I'm trying to solve is why you can't have the UK machine delivered to France. You can only have the international version delivered from the US.

This is the message you get if you try....

Kindle Wireless Reading Device, Wi-Fi, Graphite, 6" Display with New E Ink Pearl Technology cannot be shipped to the selected address. A non-UK address was selected for this UK-only Kindle. For the best wireless coverage and fastest shipping to France, please shop the US Kindle Store at Amazon.com.



Because the price of a download differs depending on where you say you are, I'm concerned that once you have a certain version of the Kindle (never mind 3G) you can then only download certain versions of the books. The UK prices are generally much lower, for the books I want, than the European or US versions.

So I want to know if anyone has any experience of trying to download a book from the US site to a UK Kindle, or vice versa.[/quote]

I've now done some trawling through the Amazon website and found this.

12 I'm in the UK, can I buy from the USA (and vice versa)?

- no. If you are a UK resident (and you have a UK address and card on file with Amazon) you must buy from the UK store. If you are in the US, you must buy from the US store. If you are in ANY other country, you are considered by Amazon to be "rest of the world" and you must order from the US store.

There is a slight grey area as to whether you can switch from .com to .co.uk to buy books. Also, if you buy a Kindle in the UK and move for a long period to (say) Germany, then Amazon may restrict your purchases from the UK store and ask you to switch to the US store - again this is rather grey and new and will develop. Hardware purchases however ARE restricted as above.


I'm wondering, given that the .co.uk prices are generally lower, whether I can use my IPortal proxy. Anyone tried?