Boing Boing: DRMed ebooks cost lots and break when you upgrade Acrobat

Thursday, May 26, 2005

DRMed ebooks cost lots and break when you upgrade Acrobat

My friend Espen, in Oslo, writes in with the story of a friend of his who bought an ebook for $172 (yes, a hundred and seventy two DOLLARS), then upgraded his version of Acrobat and lost the ability to read it. No one answers his tech support emails and his $172 ebook is just a jumble of encrypted bits on his harddrive. This is the outcome of DRM: it only punishes the people who are willing to shell out money for digital works, and it drives them to seek either infringing editions or comepeting, free information.

In January I bought my first ebook (ISBN: B0000E68Z2), which is published by Wiley. I have one copy on my laptop and a backup on my external harddrive. Last week, I downloaded and installed Adobe Professional (writer 6.0) from our company network (Norwegian School of Management, BI) - during the installation some files from the Adobe version that I downloaded and installed when I bought the ebook (from Amazon.com UK) were deleted. Since then, I have not been able to access my ebook - I have tried to get help from our computer staff but they have not been able to help me.
Adobe thinks that I'm using another computer, while I'm not - and it didn't help to activate the computer through some Adobe DRM Activator stuff. Now I have spent at least 10 hours trying to access my ebook - hope you can help

Link (Thanks, Espen!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:19:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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