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Originally Posted by Akshayy
... as I said nobody wants to break things and cause too much inconvenience.
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I will relate my own story of "inconvenience", which doesn't involve Adobe. Back in 2003 I bought a REB1100 reader, built around the *.rb ebook format. I mostly used the reader for public domain content, but I did also buy several books from the manufacturer's online bookstore. These books were encrypted. A couple of years later the manufacturer left the ebook business, and three years after that turned off the content servers. This made me an owner of several encrypted books that can only be read on a single and now utterly obsolete device. It was just a few books, not a large collection, so I didn't lose my sleep over them, but this experience made me aware that investing in a large collection of encrypted ebooks must be done with caution, if at all.
What may offer some protection to the consumer nowadays is the sheer size of the ebook market. The market was considerably smaller when Adobe migrated from ACS3 to ACS4, so all they got were a few angry customers the wider world didn't know or care about. Pulling a stunt like that today might lead to attention from regulatory government agencies or even legislatures, so the companies are more likely to exercise caution during transitions. Hopefully, the following will be observed:
(1) The top priority is protecting the user's access to his or her encrypted files. Ideally, the existing ACS4 files will be readable on all future devices, and the keys allowing the new readers to decrypt this content will continue to be installable through ADE in perpetuity for a given account, even for new ADE installations. Less preferably, the company could at least build into the ADE the option of creating an ACS5 ebook file from an ACS4 ebook file for the same account, and make sure not to time-limit this feature. I don't know if this is technically feasible.
(2) The next issue is protecting the user's existing ereader devices. Now, if a publisher decides to force their content to be ACS5 only, there is little Adobe can do, except to make sure the existing ACS4 files are still usable, as per item (1) above. Trying to add the option of down-converting an ACS5 file to an ACS4 file if ADE detects an older reader, even if it were technically feasible, may not sit well with some publishers since it would open the door to the presumably more easily circumventable ACS4. (This assumes ACS5 will be more cumbersome to break, or prove to be unbreakable altogether.) However, Adobe can make sure the ACS4 option remains available to the publishers who want to continue supporting customers with older ereader models.
Long term, Adobe can still get out of the ebook DRM business, or it can go bankrupt, as has happened to any number of companies over the years. Or the epub format may get abandoned, without it being possible to convert an encrypted book to a newer format. In the end, the only truly safe approach is to own no encrypted files. But, if one must, the above measures may at least ameliorate the dangers.