Fraught by the onslaught of copyright infringement from sinister cheapskates abroad, many industries are turning to Digital Rights Management (DRM) to protect their most valuable products.
Digital Rights Management, if you don't already know, is a means of encrypting data of just about any kind allowing only to be decrypted and sampled by the unique installation of a means of identification to one user and one user only. Pretty vague? Yeah, well so is the implementation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Rights_ManagementAnyways, I'm in college, I'm 25, I'm scratchin up every penny I have to pay for college (Devry University Online) from my floor covering business (carpet/tile/ceramic) so I can continue to live and go to college full time and hopefully get my BA in web development sometime before my knees give out and I die a miserable death crawling on all fours.
Meanwhile, all of my books for college are eBooks that are downloaded specifically designed for Adobe Reader/Acrobat (I use Acrobat, but have used reader before) and are all protected through Digital Rights Management.
Activationg your "permission" to download and view this text that you have just paid over $100 for requires you to register with Adobe using a specific .NET Passport.
Once downloaded, the text can be viewed only by a workstation that has "that" activation with "that" .NET Passport. Sound crappy? It gets worse.
You are only allowed 6 instances of that activation, once established, that can not be changed, altered, deleted, and so on, by the user.
The problem is, when you buy a new computer, reformat and install windows, maybe burn one instance on your laptop... before you know it your 6 activations are up and Adobe is now locked to those digital editions, leaving you hopelessly looking at a library of eBooks on your computer that you have paid in excess of $2000 for, and can't even read a chapter of any of them.
So you call Adobe, have them get into their server to try to delete some of your activations that you aren't using-that you've wasted but can't be removed on the user's end.
They have trouble getting into their own server! Then they delete the entire profile which doesn't help because now you have to register a new activation and you will NOT get your already downloaded editions working that way. By now, the only thing you can hope for is to download them again under your new activation account and be smarter not to use all 6 this time.
Now the way Adobe's DRM works is somewhat of a mystery to me, but I do know that with the Passport intact, it must install a code of some sort on your computer which is unique to that installation of software/hardware (i.e. a clean windows install will kill your activation forcing you to burn up another 1 of the 6).
With the rights of these particular eBooks, it is impossible to:
Save as anything other than a copy of the original protected text.
Copy or paste from the text.
Create your own .pdf with the existing.
Merge chapters into one .pdf.
Open in any other .pdf reader.
Open in any browser.
View on any other computer not using Adobe
View on any other computer not using Adobe and activated with one of your six activations.
So to recap, you spent over $100 for every book (I have more than 20 so far) that you can only read on 6 computers that might not even be there next year.
So what happened to buying a book, and loaning it to a friend to read? It appears that no longer exists with eBooks of this nature.
Furthermore, it has angered me to the extent where I have discovered a way around this nonsense and now take every .pdf that is DRM'ed and convert it to a regular .pdf that can also be viewed in other .pdf software like Fox It.
Impossible you say....
Since it is illegal to do so, and I don't fancy the idea of being thrown in stocks, shackled to the gills and repeatedly violated by the business end of a plunger... I will hold my discovery for the time being.
But for the poor serf bastards out there like myself who just want to be able to read the books they've already PAID FOR without having to "buy an additional hard copy" (the lady almost got screamed at for even suggesting that to me), and be able to make them portable without having to worry about activations and limitations..... PM me with your email and a request.
I'll do anything I can to help ease the frustration by providing you with my solution, which, believe it or not, is relatively simple. You'll end up with a universal .pdf of the same quality with all pictures/links functional and intact, and the file size is not much larger than the original.
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