Kindle, Sony's Reader require user to stick within their networks

Q: I read many book series, mostly mysteries, and often like to reread them a few years later. Even sticking exclusively to paperbacks they take up a lot of room, so my ultimate goal is to replace as many of these as possible digitally and store them on an external hard drive or some such.

My question boils down to: Can I use e-books purchased from other sources (and some are free) on Kindle and Sony's Reader?

I've been looking at e-books and Kindle seems to dominate the field.

Looks good, but it also appears you can only get books at Amazon.com and their collection doesn't include many books I want in my e-library.

Can books be downloaded from other sources? And can they be stored on an external hard drive or such? I see sources for free and for pay e-book downloads, usually in PDF format. How widely can they be used?

— Geri Bender

A: The Kindle is pretty slick, with books and newspapers automatically delivered to the device over a wireless connection. But that's the only way to move content into the Kindle — via Amazon's wireless service, which runs on a Sprint wireless network. So, no, you can't buy digital books elsewhere and load them onto the Kindle.

That said, Amazon does offer an e-mail-based service that allows you to convert HTML, Microsoft Word, PDF, JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP files to the Kindle's AZW format. And you can load sound files to the Kindle via USB or SD card. Specifically, the Kindle supports MP3, Audible and Audiobooks formats. Finally, the Kindle supports a number of unprotected text formats, including Mobipocket books and plain text files. And using the experimental Web browser, you can download such unprotected content to the Kindle.

There also is an experimental conversion available for PDF files.

By the way, don't try to download Kindle content outside the United States, because support for other cell networks has not yet been arranged.

It's pretty much the same story with the Sony Reader. The majority of content is delivered via Sony's own Sony Connect online store. And, like the Kindle, the reader can accept unsecured audio files (MP3 and AAC formats). It also can display PDF files, JPEG image files, RSS newsfeeds and Word files as well as several other personal document formats.

As for copying content to your hard drive, the devices don't directly support it, and they imply that you can't legally make copies of the material you download from them. This is a claim that hasn't been tested in court as yet.

Q: I'm using Windows XP and Internet Explorer 7. A program closing bug keeps popping up on many programs. It is labeled "VISUAL STUDIO JUST IN TIME DEBUGGER." I do not have anything called "Visual Studio." I deleted anything in the search collection that even sounded like that and it still shuts various programs down, including Internet Explorer.

— Gil Arroyo, Burien

A: Actually, you do have something called Visual Studio ... or parts of it, at any rate.

A lot of applications, and not just Microsoft applications, are written using Visual Studio. In fact, many scripts you encounter on the Internet are written with Visual Studio. And the Just-in-Time Debugger is a tool provided to help figure out what's wrong when Visual Studio applications or scripts aren't working properly.

My guess is that you're just running into this with respect to scripts running on Web pages. Chances are disabling script debugging in your browser will fix things. In Internet Explorer, go to the Tools menu and select Options. Go to the Advanced tab and then make sure that both of the following options are checked: "Disable script debugging (Internet Explorer)" and "Disable Script Debugging (Other)."

Questions for Patrick Marshall may be sent by e-mail to pmarshall@seattletimes.com or pgmarshall@pgmarshall.net. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.