ADE 3.0 wants a Vendor ID, not a user ID... but won't let me select a Vendor

Question

Hi,I am trying to open some old books I purchased from the Sony bookstore a while back.My old Sony books are, I think, protected with the Adobe DRM.  I am trying to use ADE to read my book, but it wanted me to authorize my computer.  So I did (and it claimed that the computer has been successfully authorized).  But now when I try to open my book it says:"This computer needs to be authorized with a Vendor ID to open book.epub.  To start the authorization process with an Adobe ID, click on the Continue button."When I click on "continue" I get  the old authorization dialog, but this time the eBook vendor is greyed out (and locked to Adobe ID).  Now when I try to re-authorize the book using my Adobe ID and password it barks at me and says:"The vendor account you entered is not associated with the item you are trying to open.  Try again."Then it unhelpfully hilights the eBook Vendor dropdown that is still greyed out and locked to Adobe ID.So here is my question (or questions):1) How do I tell ADE that this was purchased from Sony (I assume that is what they want from me)?2) More importantly, how do I read the book I already paid for?3) Seriously?  (This is me just venting right now) How is any normal human being supposed to navigate the intricacies of this insanely convoluted DRM scheme?  Here I am doing the right thing by purchasing my content and all I get for it is a lot of pain.  Meanwhile mythical Joe down the street just pirates his books and never even notices a single hiccup in reading a book.  Who's the chump in this situation?  I work in an industry whose products get pirated all the time so I understand the desire for DRM.  But really the only person being inconvenienced here are legitimate customers.  It is like I am being punished for doing the right thing.  (End of venting)

bvz2000 · Answer

So I seem to have figured it out. Even though ADE was requesting some sort of unknowable Vendor ID what it apparently was asking for was a different User ID. The books in question were purchased under a different account and so, even though ADE authorized my computer for the account I normally used, these particular books wanted a different authorization. Digging way way back into my email and finding another account was the only way I was able to solve the issue.

Incidentally, contacting Adobe directly did not work. Doing a google search was useless (except to find others in the same boat as me). Trying to read the docs... well that's a laugh.

The entire process has left an incredibly sour taste in my mouth. I normally stick to paper books for this reason and I am going to continue to do so from here on. When I DO purchase e-books I will do so with the following priorities:

1) Never buy books that use Adobe DRM. Kobo has a single point of failure. Amazon is the same way. Adobe... well since they sort of graft their tech onto other stuff it just turns out to be a giant clustertruck. I hate DRM for the reasons mentioned in my above post, but I have never ever ever had to deal with a DRM scheme as badly executed as this. Multiple accounts for a single asset (Sony account + Adobe account)? NO technical support whatsoever? When you run into trouble you have to try to figure out what incoherent and incorrect error messages are trying to say about business structures (vendor id? wth?) that make absolutely no sense to the end user (I bought books from the Sony store which was then purchased by Kobo - why the hell am I debugging Adobe software and Adobe accounts). ADE seems to require a level of technical proficiency comparable to software of the early 90's. The whole industry has moved past this point. ADE has not.

2) When buying books, try to avoid DRM altogether... but when you cannot do that make sure you get some that are able to be liberated from that jail. Not going to mention how to do it here, but I understand it is possible to strip the DRM from these books. If I were to do that, I could then be assured that I could continue to read the books I purchased no matter who goes out of business (Sony books, I'm looking at you) or what device I decide to upgrade to or how lousy the DRM technology is. Were I to go down that route, then I would still always purchase my books, but immediately convert them to a format that will never ever give me technical troubles again (AND let me save my annotations in an unencrypted form).

Sorry for the rant, but this (plus the Sony to Kobo transitions) has been one of the WORST digital media experiences I have ever had.

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