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 – hope you can help…

Boing Boing points to this story illustrating the fundamental flaws of digital rights management (DRM) – about a Norwegian prof who paid $172 for an ebook on Amazon UK only to have it turn to unreadable code jibberish after updating his Acrobat software. He made several pleas for help – to Acrobat, to Wiley (the publisher), and to Amazon. All were in vain. It turns out that after reading the story in Boing Boing (in the past 24 hours, I guess), Wiley finally sent a replacement copy. But the problem of built-in obsolescence in ebooks goes unaddressed.
I’m convinced that encrypting single “copies” is lunacy. For everything we gain with electronic texts – search, multimedia, connection to the network etc. – we lose much in the way of permanence and tactility. DRM software only makes the loss more painful. Publishers need to get away from the idea of selling “copies” and start experimenting with charging for access to a library of titles. You pay for the service, not for the copy. Digital books are immaterial – so the idea of the “copy” has to be revised.
Another example of old thinking with new media is the New York Public Library’s ebook collection. That “copies” of electronic titles are set to expire after 21 days is not surprising. The “copy” is “returned” automatically and you sweep the expired file like a husk into the trash. What’s incredible is that the library only allows one “copy” to be checked out a time, entirely defeating one of the primary virtues of electronic books: they can always be in circulation. Clearly terrified by the implications of the new medium (or of the retribution of publishers), the NYPL keeps ebooks on an even tighter tether than they do their print books. As a result, they’ve set up a service that’s too frustrating to use. They should rethink this idea of the single “copy” and save everyone the “quote” marks.