Teleread has a look at an all too typical case of what happens to people who are honest enough to actually put their hard earned money down and pay for ebooks crippled by DRM.
Then I bought an iPad, and suddenly reading eBooks began to crowd out my paper book reading. I wasn’t alone. By Fall 2010 there were new reading apps coming out every few weeks to target the excited iReading populace. I happily downloaded all of them and tried each one out, looking for the perfect eReading experience. Then I ran into a problem.
My iPhone wouldn’t let me authorize any new apps that utilized Adobe’s DRM. I had run out of the allotted authorizations. By March of this year, I began to contact Adobe to fix the situation, but each web case was “withdrawn”, which is to say “dismissed without solving”. I called tech support on multiple numbers and each time I was told that they only supported Adobe Digital Editions via the web. Some helped me open a case for Tier2 support, yet each of those web cases was withdrawn.
. . .
I had to delete the app and reinstall it. As I feared, this caused problems when reauthorizing with Adobe. I got the dreaded “Adobe Activation Request Error 2004”. I was locked out of my library book. I started calling Adobe again, getting the usual runaround. The one time I thought I finally got help was when a tech said he would happily reset my account, but just reset my password instead. Today I got another “Withdrawn”. Adobe would not reset my activation account for love nor money.
I think it is clear what is going on here — The Pirate Bay has clearly infiltrated content and software companies. They don’t want satisfied, paying customers. Rather, they want to create such an awful experience for average consumers that everyone gives up and just torrents everything.
It’s sad, really.