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What started out as a love affair with my new Sony Reader PRS-650 has turned sour.

A few days ago, I turned on my reader to find that I had been locked out of the book I was reading. I posted a photo to Flickr of the Reader’s annoying “Protected by Digital Rights Management” screen, joking that my paperbacks have never given me similar trouble. The problem spontaneously resolved itself after connecting the Reader to my computer, restoring access to the book. I noticed, however, that while I could finish reading the book, the Reader had lost the bookmarks I had made up to that point.

But for the last week, I’ve been reading along engaged, learning about both the ancient Irish and what it’s like to read a book on a screen. I’ve now finished my first book on the Reader and moved on to another. I chose my first two books carefully, since I wanted to test the Reader’s highlighting and bookmarking functions. They are academic books —one in philosophy, one in history. And I highlighted each extensively, just as I would have had I been reading paper. I even used the stylus a few times to hand-write notes in the margins of the “pages.”

Last night, I set down the Reader, switching it into sleep mode, to fix a cup of tea. When I returned and switched the Reader back on, I was again presented with the blank screen of DRM annoyance. This time, reconnecting the Reader to my computer did not restore access, so I got on the phone with Sony (877-263-2863).

After spending more than an hour on the phone, with most of that time connected to a remote desktop session with a Sony employee, customer service representative Mario concluded that the problem is related to an Adobe server being down and will resolve itself in the next 2 to 3 hours when the server comes back online. It was not clear whether he means that a server Adobe manages is down or whether a server that Sony uses to manage DRM via Adobe software is down. My guess is the latter.

We did a “hard reset” of my Reader, setting it back to factory settings. He uninstalled and reinstalled the Sony Reader store and “reset my account” multiple times. After all is said and done, I am still left waiting for access to my books, and most distressingly of all, I have lost highlightings, bookmarks, and notes representing hours of reading and work.

And so, I conclude here with the same question I had for Mario-from-Sony: how does Sony plan to encourage the adoption of Readers in academic environments when the Reader can catastrophically lose hours of research and notes with no way of recovering them? Is this the kind of stability I can expect from my Reader? Had I known this, I’m not sure I would have chosen the Sony Reader.