And as Keishon says, its not just the DRM issues that are problematic. If the publisher/creator of the ebook does not make it re-renderable, the text is almost impossible to read on handheld devices. Essentially, what it does is force you to scroll from the left to the right on your screen for each sentence. This makes it very difficult to read.

I’ll take a look at Mobipocket, too. As one of those Cult of Apple people, I try to avoid all things Microsoft as much as possible (Office is my MAJOR exception, and only because the Mac version is supposed to be better and more stable than the PC version).

I can see this whole ebook thing is going to be a project. I gotta get a reader, too, or a PDA or a Treo Smart phone or a Blackberry or something.

Also, I would never read these ebooks on my computer unless I had to like with Ms. Meyer’s unpublished excerpt from Edward’s POV, the stand alone sequel to Twilight that I would love to have on my keeper shelf and on my handheld—is in adobe pdf format and I can’t transfer it at all. That sucks the big one.

Thanks for the answer, though. I was hoping that downloading to a blank CD might work, but it sounds like the problem is with the Adobe software. Does it make a difference if you have the entire Acrobat program and not simply the reader (you know, the one you actually have to PAY for?), or is this a glitch in the whole Adobe infrastructure? Unless Adobe has a proprietary interest in the ebooks themselves, this makes no sense to me, because the reader is free, so they can’t be worried about pirating the reader. Weird.

Here is how it works. You buy an Adobe ebook. You must “authenticate” your version of Adobe reader. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. There is no customer service that will help you. No online support. No phone support. You cannot print, save or possibly even make an electronic bookmark. Your computer crashes. Or you buy a new computer. Or you want to read the book you bought at work on your home computer.

You must reauthenticate. Unfortunately, it thinks you have already authenticated your computer so it won’t let you reauthenticate. You curse. You throw things at the computer. You leave messages all over the internet in hopes that someone can help you. Finally, you break down and call a toll number for some help. After all, you paid for these books and you would like to access them again. After hours spent with customer support they suggest redownloading your books.

Some stores don’t let you do this. So you are out whatever you paid for these books and even though they are sitting on your harddrive, you don’t have the special key that unlocks the books.

Plus, you want to read the sucker on a handheld device? Well, the formatting of the book sucks on a smaller device. The “re-rendering” never quite works. Your book is not portable at all. Is the font too small? Too bad. Would you like to read the book with an offwhite background and a grey text? Soo sorry.

If all we had for ebook formats was Adobe I wouldn’t be reading ebooks today.

JMC — hope you like it, it was a hoot.