Technology Tales

Adventures in consumer and enterprise technology

Deauthorising Adobe Digital Editions software

Published on 12th March 2011 Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

My being partial to the occasional eBook has meant my encountering Adobe's Digital Editions. While I wonder why the functionality cannot be included in the already quite bulky Adobe Reader, it does exist and some publishers use it to ensure that their books are not as easily pirated. In my case, it is a certain publisher of walking guidebooks that uses it, and I must admit to being a sometime fan of their wares. At first, I was left wondering how they thought that the Digital Editions software option was the delivery means that would ensure that they do not lose out from sharing of copies of eBooks, but a recent episode has me seeing what they see.

One of the nice things that it allows is the sharing of eBooks between different computers using your Adobe account. Due to my own disorganisation, I admit to having more than one, however I ended up doing that. The result was that I ended entering the wrong credentials intro the Digital Editions instance on my Toshiba laptop, and I needed to get rid of them to enter the correct ones.

It is when you try doing things like this that you come to realise how basic and slimmed down this software is. After a Google search, I encountered the very keyboard shortcut about which even the help didn't seem to want to tell me: Control + Shift + D. That did the required deauthorisation for me to be able to read eBooks bought and downloaded onto another computer. Maybe Digital Editions does its job to lessen the chances after all. Of course, I cannot see the system being perfect or unbreakable, but a lot of our security is there to deter the opportunists rather than the more determined.

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