adobe digital editions is duplicating my ebooks, why?

Report · Dec 05, 2014

Recently this has started happening - on November 18th it happened first, my entire 3,771+ library in ADE was duplicated. Then, it happened again yesterday - so now I have 11, 646 books, but in reality, I only have about 3800. I am using a Windows 7 laptop and have been using ADE for at least 4 years (first book was downloaded in March 2010) and am an excellent, very knowledgeable computer user (college instructor in computer skills, former mainframe programmer, former senior helpdesk analyst). But the only way I can get my ADE to respond and delete these duplicates is one at a time -- as you can imagine that is EXTREMELY time-consuming and I wasn't even finished with the Nov 18th duplicates when it did it again on Dec 4th!!!

FYI, the My Digital Editions folder only has one copy of the ePub files but they are showing up once, twice and now three times in the ADE interface. Can anyone help me figure out what happened and how to fix it?

I am about ready to copy and rename the "My Digital Editions" folder, uninstall the ADE software and then download it again from their website and try to start over. If anyone has any different answers, I will truly appreciate any help you can provide!

Thanks, Gayle

Report · Nov 18, 2016

I have the same question. Can someone please answer?

Report · Nov 18, 2016

I'm having the same problem. Up to 5 copies of some books I've downloaded from the library. It's as if every time I open the program, it imports another instance of the books.

Report · Sep 08, 2017

I had the same frustrating problem on a Macintosh laptop. Here's how I solved the problem.

First, look in your Applications folder for any alias of Adobe Digital Editions and delete that alias file, (leave the actual ADE application file alone, do not delete it). Then in the Finder, hold OPTION and select the Go pulldown menu. Library will appear when you hold the OPTION key down. Navigate to Library > Application Support > Adobe > Digital Editions. If there are any .dat files in that folder besides activation.dat then delete them. Empty your trash. Restart your computer. Open ADE and the duplicate files should be gone.

I had to delete a few duplicates. I chose the most recent dates and deleted those files. The files never returned.

On a PC you'll probably have to do something similar. Look for the folder containing activation.dat and do the above.