Comic Books on PsP

I've had my PsP for 7-8 months now and I have to say I have thoroughly underutilized it. The platform doesn't play shooters all that well, my main choice of game, and I haven't had the spare income to devote to testing a lot of titles on it so it's largely been delegated as an oversized MP3 player; my daily commute is roughly an hour each way, totaling two hours a day in the car so I listen to a lot of audio books. The PsP works well in this regard if for no other reason than it acts as a reasonably robust audio player.

On the weekend I heard that a PS1 title that I enjoyed back in the 90's, Kain: Legacy of Blood, had been released for the PsP so I figured I'd get a copy of it. While surfing PSN I found a firmware update was available so I grabbed it. Imagine my surprise when I started my PsP up again and found that the firmware included a comic reader, a true thing of beauty.

I've been reading comics digitally for some time now and have come to appreciate it, all those issues contained electronically meant I could carry ever book ever made on my laptop if I so chose; the only downside is you NEED to have a laptop to read them, something that isn't always convenient to carry, therefore this worked perfectly, I've always got my PsP on me, so now I can also always have some comics.

I imidiatley started checking this out and soon found that the selection is limited, strictly Marvel and Marvel associated publishers and not a lot of titles; the standard Spiderman, Iron Man, and X-... titles one comes to expect from anything with the Marvel name on it, but hey it's new so it can only grow and the do offer a lot of back issues too. At prices from 1.99-2.99, how can you go wrong?

Of course all good things must come to an end, as did this when I tried to purchase my first issue and found out the comics aren't for sale in Canada! Of course they don't tell you this outright either, the instead make it impossible to find anything on the PsP PSN interface, forcing you to go to a PC for this stuff, then requiring you to install their new "Go" software for the purchase/download portion, then, and only then, when you attempt the download do you get presented with an ambiguous error message stating nothing more than a numeric code.

So there you have it, a very good thing that is once again blocked by a geo-political decision. Furthermore, I'm not impressed with Sony either, they could be stating this out in the open instead of keeping it a big secret that you have to dig for, how do they think that improves their service in anyway?