Gemstar eReader - still working

You find the oddest things when getting ready to leave one home for another.

Today we found our Gemstar eReaders. Your what?

Gemstar. eReaders from about a dozen years ago. Color. With their own store. And network connectivity - both wired Ethernet and telephone line.

I have a hundred books on mine. I read Turtledove's "Worldwar" series on it. If I remember rightly you could buy magazines as well as books for it. They were delivered directly to the device across the network.

It could run for 8 hours on a charge, more if you dimmed the screen backlight. And, surprise surprise, the battery still takes a charge. After lying discharged for years.

They don't make 'em like they used to.

It's still quite advanced when compared to today's offerings. All the concepts were there on release. Your books were even backed up "in the cloud" - though it wasn't called that then.

The books remained available for 3 years after the devices were discontinued. A good customer service move.

And they remain on my device. Which still works.

There's hope for this industry yet.

No - you may not buy this book!

And why ever not, I ask.

"The City and the Stars" by Arthur C. Clarke is one of Science Fiction's great works. I don't know how often I've read it. It bears re-reading.

And I bought it for my Kindle some time ago, from Amazon, in the US. I read it. Archived it. Today I was extolling the virtues of the book. We went to see what it cost on Amazon. Not there.

I thought I remembered buying it, nay buying and reading it, so I checked. Sure enough, there in my Digital Items it was. I clicked on the product information and the cover showed up.

And a note that it was not available to people living in the US. I live in the US. It is, however, available for purchasers from the Amazon UK site.

And there we have it, a concern I have about electronic books. If I want to read a book, but it's not published  here in the US, I get a friend or a relative to buy the book on my behalf (a friend of mine did that once for me - but instead of buying one copy of Paul Gallico's "Jennie", titled "The Abandoned" in the US, she bought six! The Lady C was ever thus.)

You can't do that with ebooks. Somehow, I'm not "allowed" own a book not made available in the US.

This is not good.

Lest anyone think that I'm not "for ebooks and e-readers", allow me to present my credentials. I've owned e-readers for well over a decade. My first was the Rocket E-Reader in the late nineties. The side of a large paperback and an ugly gray screen, it was a marvel in its day.

I progressed, after a couple of years,  to the Gemstar color e-reader, which had an Ethernet port (wired) that allowed, what today we would call, in-app purchases. In the end, I bought two of the Gemstars, as the device was discontinued after a few years.

Both of them are alive to this day. Both of them still capable of displaying the content they contain.

A Sony e-reader followed the Gemstar, later traded in for the next version of Sony's technology. Both versions were the new e-ink displays. The Sony still works, and still displays the over 100 books I own on that platform.

The first Kindle, then a Kindle DX, one iPad with Kindle software and now a color Nook (so I can see e-books I publish for that platform) mean that I am very much part of the e-book/e-reader enthusiast group.

Yet there is a restriction placed on me as a purchaser of books in the digital realm that does not, nay cannot, exist in the world of dead-tree books. In the world of dead-tree books I could phone a book store in another country, order the book I wanted, and have it shipped to me. I could even do so using the online-store of such a book store.

I cannot do that with an e-book - the store won't sell it and thus I cannot get it onto my device for reading.

I've just now tried to download the copy I purchased at some time in the past to my Kindle app. There's an error in synching - so no book.

This is not good.