Alternative to Adobe Digital Ed

It seems that everybody is bitching about the current state of DRM, and the virtual stranglehold Adobe has on the field. With their monopoly, they have no incentive to improve the functionality of ADE. So it is up to us users. Why not crowd source a class action suit, potentially all the way up to the supreme court to break the ADE monopoly. Where are the civil right activists?

This is still a young field, and everyone's product is still developing. I

would guess that your problems don't have to do with ADE itself, but with

the way ebooks have been transfered, the digital rights assigned to them, or

the files themselves.

ADE and the Nook/Nook color are the subject of several threads in the

Forum. I don't have one, but it would make sense that setting up the Nook

has to be done very carefully. I have seen a couple of posts that show how

to get the Nook to work that tell you to manipulate data on the Nook using

your system's utilities, not ADE.

Ebooks are a different subject. ADE supports only a couple of formats. The

ones that work well are .epub and .pdf - both are formats that Adobe helped

develop. There are some issues with certain .pdf characteristics, such as

named pages and native annotations, and certain other anomalies (JPEG 2000

pictures). Also, ebook publishers can specify how the ebook is managed by

anyone's software (it's part of the conventions established to conform to

the Digital Millenium Copyright Act), and that can cause differences in what

you can do with an ebook.

ADE itself has some quirks. Sometimes, if you are downloading an ebook, and

you choose 'OPEN' during the process, rather than 'SAVE', the ebook will

transfer to ADE in the Reading panel, not the Library panel. You can still

download the ebook to your Nook while the Reading panel is open, though.

When it's on the Nook, it might not appear in ADE's Library view. It's

caught me off-guard several times.

There are ways to 'fix' some of these problems so that ADE and your Nook are

showing the same thing. What you can't get around, though, are the digital

rights assigned to the ebook itself.

I hope this is helpful background. If you want more, lemme know, and I'll

give you what processes I have for specific issues. Putting them in this

post would make it unmanageable.

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I agree with your post and share your frustration.  I think the problem is that you're stuck with whatever digital rights management scheme the publisher chooses, which is kind of a dumb model.   It's unclear whether publishers use multiple digital rights management schemes.  Perhaps those of us who are fed up with ADE should voice our opinions to publishers, who may listen because it affects their bottom lines. 

I think there is a small Scottish company that does digital rights management in a way that sounds reasonable.  Maybe they can offer something that works better.  Hey, maybe Google can do this.  They do everything else ;-).

Better still, someone can write a specification of how digital rights management programs should behave, to put the horse before the cart.