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By David Rothman

Manybooks.netThe Sony Librie, an e-book machine with a proprietary format from hell, is winning so far over Matt McClintock. Matt created and runs Manybooks.net, probably the Internet’s best-presented collection of Gutenberg classics. Not lacking in either brains or diligence, Matt worked hard but in vain to use my Librie to refine his conversion of the format. Now the Librie is on its way back to me.

The Librie lacks sufficient English-language documentation, the result of Sony not caring about the overseas market at this point. But Japanese readers with a fondness for English-language classics could have benefitted from Matt’s work. Although other factors also complicated Matt’s job, this is yet another example of the folly of proprietary e-book formats. Now people will have one fewer reasons to buy a Librie, at least unless there are some surprises ahead.

What happened, or didn’t, is a reflection on the Librie and the bunglers at Sony–not Matt or Librie users. He and I both remain in admiration of the Librie community, which has done wonders with software workarounds. I just wonder if an English-language version of the machine will ever be released, especially without all the proprietary complications and fiendish DRM.

I mentioned to Matt that I’d be blogging his responses to my questions about his Librie saga, so here’s an almost-full reproduction of his replies.

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How far did you get in the format? How useful is the Librie beta format on that terrific site of yours? (I’d like to quote you in the blog if you don’t mind.)

It’s hard to tell how useful/popular the Librie formatted texts on manybooks.net are, first because I wasn’t able to really determine if the files that are currently being served are useful (you tried a few, right? Some worked, some didn’t, and I couldn’t figure out the how/why). I also suspect that there just aren’t that many English-speaking Librie users yet, except for the tech savvy ones that can convert their own files. I also can’t tell if either of the Japanese language ebooks on manybooks.net display correctly (I suspect they don’t).

http://manybooks.net/format_stats.php

As you can see from the format statistics, Librie is the least popular — there haven’t been any recent downloads, as far as I can tell.

Apparently you’ve decided that you could better spend your hours in other ways, and I don’t blame you.

Well, I’ll keep messing with it every now and then, but I’m going to wait until a few of the barriers are removed – a) the language barrier, b) the poor conversion tools supplied by Sony, and c) possibly a better understanding of how the files are stored on the memory stick (I just don’t work with Windows enough to be able to get the various alternative methods working correctly).

So, part of the problem is my own lack of Windows experience, compounded by my lack of Japanese language skill. The other part is an admitted frustration with the ridiculous DRM stuff that still gets in the way of the excellent makelrf tool from scythic (how else can you explain the fact that you can’t simply load an lrf file onto the memory stick and have the Librie read it?).

Overall I thought the hardware was pretty compelling — it’s a great size, the resolution is fantastic, the battery life was great, and I could even get used to the lower-contrast grey/black look. But Sony’s really mucked it up with their DRM.

And with all that said–if the device was priced right I could rationalize all sorts of work-arounds to get it running (say, if Sony sold it for $200 or whatever). Maybe someday, right?…

Hey, I’ve got to hand it to the Librie community — they’ve done some amazing stuff, and the way they’ve shared information is commendable. I hope that they’re given their due when the English language Librie is (finally) released.

Take care,
-Matt

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Memo to myself: I want to try the GUI version of Peter Knowles’ BookListGen.

 
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