Authorizing ADE to transfer books to Kobo

Two questions about this:

1) I have found instructions that say I need to authorize my computer to create an Adobe ID.
In Adobe Digital Editions, the "Authorize Computer" and other menu items related to authorization are all greyed out and do nothing.

2) When I tried to use the live-chat help option on the Adobe site, the agent there (presumably a real person) told me that ADE was a discontinued legacy product. Was this a language-barrier misunderstanding or is ADE actually obsolete?  If so, what *should* I be using