Old College Digital editions recovery

Question

I have backup copies of my college digital editions that I would like to access. The problem I have run into is that they were backed up from an old Windows XP machine that lost the hard drive to a crash and I cannot remember how I authorized access to these books. I created a Adobe ID and tried authorizing my computer but I still cannot open the books. Most of them give me an error with the file that is non-descript but 3 of then give me a message that the Vendor ID is not associated with my Adobe ID which makes sense because I did not have an ID when I downloaded these books in 2006.

Is there a way to recover these books? I would really like to review the ones I had for Information Technology and Management.

sjpt · Answer

You won't be able to read them with any Adobe ID except the ID they were origianlly purchased/downloaded under.

Each Abode ID/account has [1] an internal fixed format string, and [2] an external one in email address format that can be changed.

You can find the internal ID from the instructions below.

If Adobe are helpful they should be able to restore your access to the account given the internal ID ~ I am not sure they will be.

If not, I am afraid I can't think of any other way to get the books back.

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OK. To find the internal AdobeID.

open a sample DRM .epub file as a .zip file.

With some zip programs, you can just open the .epub as an archive (ev, with 7zip),

with others you will have to rename the .epub file to a .zip file first, then open it.

find the file 'rights.xml' within the zip. Probably 'META-INF\rights.xml'

open the rights.xml file

inside you will find a section '<user>' that looks something like

<user>urn:uuid:ff2ddc22-eca0-46c6-a84d-xxxxxxxxxxxx</user>

That string is the internal version for your AdobeID.

That stays fixed for the AdobeID, even if you change the associated email (or password),

that internal ID is what is really associated with the book.

(n.b. there is no point in trying to change the urn to a current one you might find and recreating the .epub file; the DRM is cleverer than that).

You can now contact Adobe at Adobe Live Chat: http://www.adobe.com/support/chat/ivrchat.html

It may be that if you can give them that internal ID they will be able to get you access to your account again.

If they say they can't, it might be worth trying two or three times at intervals;

it seems from what others have said that some of the representatives are very clued up, but others are not.

(I've never used the Live Chat).

If you do go through all that, let us know how you got on.

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