Gary Drumm – PMP, ITIL

Dear Sony,

For the love of all that is holy and pure, please fix your ridiculous ebook reader software so that it stops crashing while trying to sync my store purchases with my reader.  A strange problem to have for the software that’s supposed to be designed to sync my purchases with my reader.  Kindly remove your heads from your nether regions and make this $200 item more than a very expensive PDF reader.

Thank you,

Frustrated User

:::

OK.  So as you may have gathered, I’m having issues with my PRS 505.  I just pulled the thing out of the archives and dusted it off, installed the software, bought a couple of books and thought, “hey, this is pretty cool”.  Low and behold, the damn thing starts crashing!  I’ve had the software installed for les than 24 hours and it’s already crashing?  WTH!?  I have all of the latest software, and firmware updates.  I have the official “Sony USB cord”.  I have crap loads of available space and memory, so why am I crashing?

You would think if a software application’s sole purpose for existence is to sync with a particular device it would, at the very least, sync with the freakin’ device!  So what’s Sony’s official answer?  The same answer as every other software vendor on the planet: Remove the application and re-install.  Only it’s not quite that simple.  Turns out that there are five, count them, five hidden folders that you also have to remove because the uninstall doesn’t get rid of them.  Yet you MUST get rid of them before the “uninstall” fix works.  What’s the point?!!

So Sony please, unless you want to lose 100% of your ebook market share to Amazon’s Kindle, fix this ridiculous problem!  I mean, come on.  

For anyone else who’s having this problem:

• De-authorize your computer from the eBook store
• Uninstall the application
• Find the following folders and delete them:
  Please delete the following folders as listed below:  

  For XP
  C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\kinoma
  C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Marlin 
  C:\Documents and Settings\%username%( i.e. you windows log in name)
  \Local Settings\Application Data\kinoma
  C:\Documents and Settings\your user name\Local Settings\Application
  Data\Sony Corporation
  C:\Program Files\Sony\eBook Library 

  For Vista

  C:\ProgramData\kinoma
  C:\ProgramData\Marlin
  C:\Program Files\Sony\eBook Library 
  C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Sony Corporation
  C:\Users\%usernam%\AppData\Local\kinoma

• Re-install the application
• Just for good measure, wipe your reader’s memory because you may also have a corrupted sync file there as well.

Or, you could go for the more cost effective approach:

• Go to Craigslist.Com
• List you Sony reader for sale in your area
• Collect the money from your buyer.
• Save up an extra $100
• Buy a Kindle

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 9:07 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.