Overdrive, DRM, and Adobe Digital Editions

The Denver library recently migrated its ebook system. Incidentally, it wiped all my holds in the process and I have no idea what stuff I was waiting to read. So if you recced anything over the past 6 months and it was popular, chances are that I need you to remind me to read it again.

Anyway, today my first hold came in on the new system. I downloaded the ascm file as usual, double clicked, and when Adobe Digital Editions opened, I got this on my screen:

Yikes. I immediately assumed it was time to update Adobe Digital Editions. So I did that. And I tried opening it up again and I got this:

While you can see the massive UI improvements Adobe has made to its signature Mac e-reader, I was still rather stuck.

So I googled for E_ACT_NOT_READY and “IO Error on Network Request” and tried all the things that didn’t work until I found something that did work.

What didn’t work:

  • Clearing out ~/Documents/Digital Editions
  • Creating a new ~/Documents/My Digital Editions
  • Quitting and restarting the apps
  • Rebooting

What did work was reauthorizing my computer. Dunno why. I deauthorized and then reauthorized — good thing I remembered my username and password because it has been a gadzillion years since I did this last — and boom it finally worked.

(If you want to remove authorization by hand, toddle over to ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Digital Editions and kill the activation.dat file.)

Anyway, Scott Sigler’s “Alive” is now on my system ready for reading. I have no idea why I put this title on hold and who recommended it to me. I hope it’s good. Here’s finger’s crossed that this is a good read.

3 Comments