the problems with e-technology

over the last little while, business' have been pumping out electronic jargon for the common man like a whale spouts water. ebooks, novels, online music were meant to be the rave. it was a step forward to a paperless society. libraries were to become obsolete. digital media storage were announcing breakthroughs in data storage. what happened? drm happened. drm stands for digital rights management or digital restrictions management which means any of several technical arrangements which empower a vendor of content in electronic form to control how the material can be used on any electronic device with such measures installed. recently a fellow in norway had this issue. who bought an ebook for $172, then upgraded his version of acrobat and lost the ability to read it. no one answers his tech support emails and his $172 ebook is just a jumble of encrypted bits on his harddrive. this is the outcome of drm: it only punishes the people who are willing to shell out money for digital works, and it drives them to seek either infringing editions or competing, free information.

he reports,

In January I bought my first ebook (ISBN: B0000E68Z2), which is published by Wiley. I have one copy on my laptop and a backup on my external harddrive. Last week, I downloaded and installed Adobe Professional (writer 6.0) from our company network (Norwegian School of Management, BI) - during the installation some files from the Adobe version that I downloaded and installed when I bought the ebook (from Amazon.com UK) were deleted. Since then, I have not been able to access my ebook - I have tried to get help from our computer staff but they have not been able to help me. Adobe thinks that I'm using another computer, while I'm not - and it didn't help to activate the computer through some Adobe DRM Activator stuff. Now I have spent at least 10 hours trying to access my ebook.

also here is another case with a fairly similar issue.

I'd never actually bought an eBook.

So I thought, how does this work? Is it Microsoft blahblah reader only? Is it PDF? And then I clicked on and discovered that Amazon provides both a "Microsoft Reader" version and a "Adobe Reader" version. "Aha! Adobe! So it's PDF! I can buy it here now, and print it at school tomorrow! I can read it on all my computers! I can bring it on my PDA! Lovely! I don't have to wait!". So I clicked on. Payed my $5 and after some "personalization progress" (probably for branding my own PDF so they could trace it back to me if it appeared on bittorent) I was redirected to a download site.

So I had just bought my first eBook. I thought. But it wasn't a book. There was hardly an "e". All I got was this lousy XML file named ebx.etd.

So I went back to Amazon, clicking on eBook support. I had tried everything they said to try if you had problems. It was a big list. I wonder how it was many years ago when real books came with a 5 page list of things to do if you couldn't open the book. I wanted to cancel my purchase. As all I had was some "ebx-transfer" file, and not the real book.

go through the two websites mentioned above to see what sort of support amazon and adobe offered them. truly horrendous and sad.