How to solve ADE crashing on Mac OSX 10.9 when opening library ascm/epub files?

When trying to open some, but not all, epub library books using ADE, ADE sometime simply crashes and quits, for specific books.  The only error message I get is "Adobe Digital Editions quit unexpectedly"  —which is not a terribly helpful message, since it's pretty obvious what just happened.  I'm using a mid 2009 macbook with Mavericks (10.9.5) and some of my library books work just fine, while others crash the machine when I try to read them (the book downloads & shows up in my library, but if I try to read it, ADE crashes & quits.  I'm using the same reader, same computer, and same library account  for everything I've read using ADE and I cannot find any useful help about why ADE will open some of my library books, but not others, even though they all appear to be in the same format.  I was hoping that ADE would get me out from under the tyranny of Kindle and actually be a functional e-reader on my laptop, but so far, that has not been the case.