This is an Adobe bug. Details here: Gordon's Tech: The curse of DRM - can't read new book because Adobe E_ACT_NOT_READY. In my case the workaround of "Navigate to /Users/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Digital Editions and drag the activation.dat file to the trash" then relaunching the .ascm file allowed reauthorization. The bug, in my case, is that Adobe didn't handle the use case of restoring from backup. Since authorization is device specific, I couldn't deauthorize because I wasn't using the original device. Deleting activation.dat allowed authorization as a new machine. Adobe needs to add device deauthorization to the Adobe ID profile -- Google and Apple do this for the devices they track. They also need to fix the code so it handles the cause of a machine-specific authorization file on a new machine -- it should ask user if the old machine should be deauthorize, then request new machine specific authorization and it should "explain" why the authorization is needed.
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