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Adobe's New Ebook DRM Will Leave Existing Users Out In the Cold Come July

Posted by Unknown on from the remember-when-sharing-books-was-normal dept.

Nate the greatest writes "Whether it's EA and SimCity, the Sony rootkit scandal, or Ubisoft, we've all read numerous stories about companies using DRM in stupid ways that harm their customers, and now we can add Adobe to the list. Adobe has just announced a new timeline for adoption of their recently launched 'hardened' DRM, and it's going to take your breath away. In a video posted to Youtube, Adobe reps have stated that Adobe expects all of their ebook partners to start adopting the new DRM in March. This is the same DRM that was launched only a few weeks ago and is already causing problems, but that hasn't stopped Adobe. They also expect all the stores that use Adobe's DRM to sell ebooks (as well as the ebook app and ebook reader developers) to have fully adopted the new ebook DRM by July 2014. That's when Adobe plans to end support for the old DRM (which everyone is using now). Given the dozens and dozens of different ebook readers released over the past few years, including models from companies that have gone under, this is going to present a significant problem for a lot of readers. Few, if any, will be updated in time to meet Adobe's deadline, and that's going to leave many readers unable to buy DRMed ebooks."

3 of 304 comments (clear)

  1. In other words... by Noryungi · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hate him or love him: Richard Stallman was right! Read it and weep: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...

    The whole thing was written in 1997, for pete sake - when ebooks where still pretty much prototypes.

    --
    The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
    1. Re:In other words... by gmuslera · · Score: 5, Informative

      Project Guttenberg is around since 1971. Ebooks (and in particular, public ones) didn't started with Kindle.

  2. Re:*Shrug* by afxgrin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Calibre is a god send piece of open source software. I don't really use it for stripping DRM, most documents I read don't have any DRM. But for converting between formats especially when the default formatting is crap for ebooks - fuck yes this is the shit.

    Main website and for the sourceforge page in case you're are too lazy to Google search it yourself. Apparently this guy is hosting DeDRM the DRM stripping tool. I've never had to use it.