So I bought a very cheap book from Waterstones’ online store and decided to download it legally. First off, I had to install Sony’s Reader Library software. Sometimes it’s called the EBL, which means the same thing, you just have to kind of guess that. It looks like an Air app, but installing it requires a restart (my first in a month, but hey, I’m open minded at this point).

Now comes the fun part: downloading the book. Waterstones give me a page telling me I have to have Digital Editions installed (which, as it happens, I know I don’t, but their sales completion page disagrees with their own eBook FAQ). So I click on the Digital Editions link to see if I really can install it — and am told that whilst doing so is mandatory and supported, it is also “System”, which means impossible and unsupported:

(By the way, the brown button is a link, which I clicked hoping it would explain what was going on, but it takes you to this page. Ho hum. I’d like to know what the minimum system requirements are, because I’m doing all this on a month-old Core i5 iMac with 4GB of RAM and about 900GB of spare disk space, so their target market here is going to be pretty slim: Crays? A Beowulf cluster of them?)

OK, think I, I am bigger than this. Just because they’re saying I have to download Digital Editions doesn’t mean I actually have to download Digital Editions. I can use the EBL (that’s “EBL” for “Reader Library”, remember) instead of Digital Editions. So I ignore the warning on the site and nervously click the button anyway. Sure enough, a file downloads. Woo! I am having a success here! Much happiness. This is a “licence file” which is a pointer to content held somewhere else. Now all I do is double-click the file, and Reader Library launches. Woo!

Now it advises me that, to open this file, I will need to authorise this computer for Adobe DRM. Fine, think I, this is OK; in fact I *have* a Digital Editions account for when I was playing around with this when I first got the Reader before there was Mac software for it. So I tap in the email address, click in the password field, and then my keyboard stops working. Ten minutes of grief later, including fetching an old keyboard from the wardrobe in case the Sony software was unhappy about Bluetooth keyboards being used on password fields (laudable security-consiousness?) I realise that you actually just have to restart a random number of times and never use the mouse and then sometimes you will be able to type in the password field.

Deep breath, cup of coffee. Not that I would, but if I were to have taken the piracy route, I would now have been fifty pages into the book. As it is I have a new piece of software and a headache and less money and a wonky muscle from trying to extract the keyboard from the top of the wardrobe. But all this has been carefully planned out by all these nice people so probably it’ll all be very smooth now.

But of course, it isn’t.

Having finally got the thing to accept that, yes, these keystrokes are intended for that textfield, I triumphantly click on “Yes” to authorise this computer. The dialog box closes and… well, that’s it. It’s closed.

Skip ten minutes with Sony’s online help, Waterstones’ FAQs, and I learn that if I select “About Reader Library” it will tell me whether the computer has been successfully authorised for Adobe DRM. I duly so select and discover that all my clicking has had no effect whatsoever as this computer is not authorised, etc. etc. You could see this one coming, right?

So I repeat the whole sorry business. And it’s miserable.

And it doesn’t work.

Now fuming, and convinced that, were there justice in the world, every person responsible for this user interaction fiasco would be burning in a pit of molten glass, I decide to relax, let my mind wander, and remember that I am an intelligent software designer and that I can figure this out. Of course, the answer is to install Digital Editions (let’s just remind ourselves that, for reasons I am not authorised to know, my system doesn’t meet the fabled Minimum Requirement), authorise *that* on first run, and then restart the Reader Library. Then double-click on the book. Sorry, the licence for the book. Then it opens, then it downloads it. I weep with very joy.

Then I drag the book from the “Library” entry to the “Reader” entry and am prompted to authorise my reader…. which was fine, actually, but you can imagine the thoughts pounding through my mind in enormous nervousness.

Moral of the story: a legitimate purchase cost me a couple of quid for a sample book, about an hour and a half out of my Sunday, a headache, a pulled muscle, and total loss of any remaining calm. I realise that there are all sorts of very difficult issues here for Waterstones and for Sony in keeping publishers happy and in providing support across multiple third parties, but let’s be clear:

• There was no consistent attempt on Waterstones’ part to explain what I, as an end user on a supported platform, needed to do to get the content I had purchased. The only attempt there was was basically wrong (“You must install Digital Editions”). I would recommend they test their usability on the entire product stack because even if 90% of this wasn’t their fault, it’s still their brand I had the relationship with. And I am telling people how bad it was.
• Sony, Sony, Sony. You have finally done Mac support. I love you. But please user test your site and call your software by the same name throughout. I beg you. And I know it’s difficult-to-impossible with the geographically fragmented content market to give consistent directions to users, but see if there’s anything you can do. And fix the Adobe DRM in Reader Library – it’s the sole reason people install this over, say, the excellent and free-as-in-speech Calibre, so you should be testing the bejesus out of it, not releasing something that kind of works. This does your brand no good at all. And I am telling people how bad it was.
• And oh, oh, Adobe. I don’t know what to say. You’ve found a market for this, you’ve sold it efficiently, but you are not delivering a good customer experience. You are, in fact, conspicuously inserting yourself as yet *another* party into a transaction which, even without your help, would have been significantly less pleasant than just plain old stealing. Sort out the message I get on the Waterstones site. Sort out the Sony Reader Library software for them (it looks like an Air app and I would assume Sony are just plugging in a DE authentication module from you rather than building one of their own)

So, maybe I will occasionally buy the odd non-free eBook through this route. After all, I’ve sorted all the tools out now. But I dread the day one of the parties upgrades something and I lose another Sunday afternoon to trying to have a bit of Wodehouse to flip through. And all of this because I was trying to give you my money! You’ve got to do better than this, guys. Manning manage to sell ebooks I can download immediately and read easily without any of this piddling about at all. Every page has my name on it. I have no objection to that, none. I have never pirated one because they’re damn good books and I believe it’s right to repay the authors. But where you are concerned, I am a pirate and must be protected against. So I, who try to do things the legitimate way, lose my temper and my hair while someone who is not so inclined can very easily just go and download the thing in five minutes and read it on any of his devices.

Could you just put up a paypal link accepting donations and let me get my content from BitTorrent? That would definitely be way, way simpler.

• Tim Burton’s new Alice in Wonderland
• Plan B
• Dare
• The Man Who Loved Yngve
• Zombies of Mass Destruction
• The Big Gay Musical
• A Single Man
• The Sorcerer’s Apprentice “starring” Nicholas Cage*
• Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire
• Milk

* nb: Nicholas Cage makes me feel nauseous every time he appears on screen. I have no idea why. I’m sure he is a fine and nuanced actor at the peak of his professional powers. But I simply cannot stand him one teensy little bit. And that makes me sad, because I’m not a hater.

An occasional feature brought to you by this rattling round inside my head during a bout of insomnia.

That is all. I thank you.

* i.e. zero to one

1. “Gosh, a lot of you are actually driving very sensibly” — which is a shame, because a lot of them actually are for once.
2. “Your strategy of revving it high, throwing it in first and then rapidly releasing the clutch has achieved its predictable effect in making you go sideways. Why do you look so perplexed?” — because not everyone has quite got the hang of it.
3. “I don’t care, ma’am, if one word from your children could bring peace to the Middle East: I am not walking in the road to avoid them when you have them strung out across the entire pavement.” — because I am not always completely lovely to everyone
4. “Yes, you’re right; your rear fog intensifier *should* be turned on, even though there is no snow and visibility is perfect. It is, as you so astutely surmise, an infra-red lamp which melts away the snow to the benefit of the driver following you. You are being public-spirited and are not merely an idiot who is blinding everyone.” — because sometimes I’m not above low sarcasm
5. “Would you like to get in?” — which I would have said, after stopping and opening the boot, to the woman following me home from work, who had dyed her hair three shades darker and whose roots were starting to show. Not that she was close or anything.
6. “This looks just like a chocolate box” — because it really does, down my road. Smoke curling out of chimneys, tree branches laden with snow, little fox footprints everywhere…

Do feel free to share your own words of wisdom, frustration or delight in the comments….

I confess it: Tish, thought I; surely I did rather well on my Shakespeare paper in Part One of Tripos? Wasn’t my USP my access to the text as it would be on stage? Hadn’t I actually got rather a decent idea of all this stuff, and hadn’t I in some ways rather less to learn that some of these people?

Naturally, and as is generally to be expected in life when one feels too sure of one’s own competence a long time after last exercising it, I was utterly, completely, and embarrassingly wrong.

Within ten minutes of the start, I’d remembered that, set against every inward textual thought I’d ever had whilst contemplating the performance of Shakespeare from my university sofa, there existed the actual production of it for an audience- a group of people who collectively constituted the fundamental reason I as an actor am on the stage, and whose presence profoundly inflects every turn of phrase or the foot. What the Riverside Shakespeare describes (with its own distinctive dry humour) as “bawdy quibbles” turned into the most outrageous innuendos. The driest, flattest text with the least connection between the characters on the page pops up into a fast, witty, and far from trivial construction that holds the audience spellbound and reshapes the stage for those on it as well as those around it.

Essentially, I’m saying I got rather over-excited by the whole thing and thoroughly enjoyed it. Bring me a board. I wish to tread it.

Whilst Pig might benefit from some gentle trimming toward the end of the first act, especially for the younger members of the audience, the second act sweeps in with great assurance and some of what, if this were not in the workmanlike surroundings of the ROH’s Linbury Studio, I would be tempted to call ‘catchy numbers’. There’s some neat wordplay in the libretto throughout, too, which culminates in some truly delicious couplets, all of which escape me now but which made sufficiently different sense to kids and grown-ups to provoke the odd coughing fit. (Remember, kids, a spindle’s not a plaything….) Some witty costuming helps — I loved the three princesses’ wigs — and the cast give every impression of having a great deal of fun with it.

There’s pizzazz in the staging, though personal taste would have made more use of the vertical space the studio affords, undeniable comedy throughout, and if the idea of kids puts you off, bear in mind this is still the ROH – Tarquin and Jocasta were kept well under thumb.