My wife, Alli, has a number of PDF ebooks she purchased from the Center for Creative Leadership. These ebooks come with built in DRM for anti-printing. They also seem tied somehow to an Adobe Reader version earlier than Adobe Reader 8. When she had Reader 7 installed, they worked fine. She recently upgraded to Reader 8
Last night, she tried to read the books for some research she’s doing. Adobe Reader 8 refused to open them and opened Labs in Firefox, pointing her at Adobe Digital Editions. Downloading and installing that also didn’t work.
She now has a bunch of DRM-laden ebooks that are of critical importance to her research but which are unusable due to some form of strangeness in the DRM between Adobe Reader 7 and 8. I can tell you, she was singularly underwhelmed. No wonder people generally hate DRM.
So, for any of the Adobe folks that occasionally happen by here, can you tell me how we might fix this? I’d really appreciate it, and Alli would be pretty happy too, I imagine.
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Hmm, the response I had here earlier disappeared…?
jd
JD – Nope, never saw it. Didn’t come through moderation or anywhere else… Repost?
Time to use Foxit Reader. Fast, reliable and light.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader_2/down_reader.htm
It was a long post, with links… I saw it in-the-page, then a later refresh removed it… let me summarize.
Reader 8 FAQ describes how it doesn’t contain decryption for ebooks… Digital Editions does… carryover of licenses into ADE beta is usually automatic, but I’ve seen some word from Bill McCoy and forum discussions that that isn’t always the case… searching in discussion forum with term “drm” brings up current conversations… I couldn’t tell whether “don’t work” referred to Digital Editions beta in general or particular assets viewed in it.
Stephen,
Apologies if I am not responding correctly to this blog, but I work in the Publications Group at the Center for Creative Leadership and very much would like to better understand the challenges your wife, Allie, had with the titles that she tried to open. Can you email me and let me know which titles she purchased and exactly where she purchased them? At this time, CCL does not sell e-books from our website so if I knew where you purchased them and exactly which titles were purchased in e-book format I may be able to assist your wife in resolving the matter.
Kelly Lombardino
Manager, Publication Dissemination
Kelly, I’ve forwarded your very helpful and responsive approach to Alli. I’m sure she’ll be in touch. Meantime, I’m also following up JD’s feedback re Reader/ADE DRM.
from another library blog post:
An integral part of Adobe Reader 8 that acts as the client bookshelf, Adobe Digital Editions (ADE), is technically still in beta. Currently, there is not a version of ADE available for the Mac. Ebook users should continue to enjoy Adobe eBooks on their currently installed version of Adobe Reader. The following was taken from the Adobe website in response to an Adobe customer issue:
“Unfortunately, these books were apparently packaged as openable only on one machine. there appears to be a bug in the ADE migration process that we don’t handle this case correctly. We are working to fix this bug and put out a new release. In the meantime, if you re-install Acrobat 7 for the moment, you should be able to open your book again. We regret the problems this has caused.”
[quote comment="20876"]Time to use Foxit Reader. Fast, reliable and light.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader_2/down_reader.htm/quote
Foxit reader doesn’t help here. Says file is encrypted.