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Topic: Adobe Reader 6 - eBook Migration Failure
Conf: (P-PDF) Acrobat 6.0, Msg: 88456
From: zridling
Date: 5/28/2003 11:20 PM
Like a few folks, I've spent hundreds of dollars on ebooks over the past three years. But now that I've upgraded to Adobe Reader 6 with its DRM, I can neither read nor access any of MY purchased ebooks!
I did not uninstall eBook Reader 2.2 before installing Adobe Reader 6. Installation went fine after the obligatory reboot (although it was quite tedious to set up). Next I activated the ebook web services using the Adobe DRM activator. Then I downloaded, installed, and ran the Adobe eBook Migration Utility for Windows, which proceeded to give me several errors before apparently working, giving me a message that read something like, "All you eBooks have been successfully migrated." But when I went into Adobe Reader 6 and tried to add the books in "My Bookshelf," I get an error dialog that reads: "Could not add file to My Bookshelf: something was not found." So I called Adobe tech support which kindly informed me that they didn't know what could be wrong, giving me instead an 800-number that no one seems to pick up (I'm on my 2nd straight day of trying, and I verified the number online). So still I'm not allowed to read my own ebooks.
This is what I TRULY HATE about digital rights management is its built-in "security" that says you don't own what you paid for, and you can't access what you paid for unless you get their permission (or pay someone more money for renting it for a while longer). Never again. From now on, I will purchase a conversion plug-in and convert everything I own to a lousy open format like plain text. I LOVE Acrobat, but I will never opt for a closed file format system again, ever. Like Microsoft, this just teaches me DO NOT rely on a corporation to get it right.
What a disappointing week. If you're unable to migrate your ebooks, let's get together and see if we can solve this. Otherwise, I just learned a very expensive lesson and have been robbed of my personal [paid for] property.
