ADE transition to Bytebooks

[latepaul]

I received an email this morning from ebooks.com notifying me that the sign-in to ADE is moving to a service called Bytebooks and that I may, after the change, need to create a new account.

The way you sign in to ADE is changing.

Nothing else is changing; just the sign-in process.

You currently use your Adobe ID to sign in to ADE. But in early June you'll need to create an account with ByteBooks to sign in to Adobe Digital Editions.

You don't need to act now; we'll notify you once this change has been made.

It was a long-ish email but it was the same text as this page

From what I understand it means that after the change you will no longer be able to authorize new devices using your ADE account but will have to create a new Bytebooks account with the same password. Also if you log in again.

It doesn't say exactly when this is happening, but if you go to the Bytebooks page there's a link for "Already have an Adobe ID account", which when you click it, gives a pop-up saying

This feature is scheduled to launch after the end of May. We appreciate your patience.

There's also an Adobe page about it.

TBH my first thought was de-DRM. I moved to buying almost exclusively ADE epubs because of Amazon increasingly making it harder.

From all the talk of devices that are already authorized not being affected, I'm hoping that my existing set up will still work. I'm not going to mess with it. I'm probably not going to create a Bytebooks account until I have to.

I did look to see if anyone else had posted about this but the only thread I found was this one which is mostly about ADE on Mac (and Apple Silcon v Intel) and only mentions Bytebooks in passing.

[danceswithcats]

Good morning, @latepaul,

Same, same. I'm hoping Adobe are just bored of an unprofitable sideline and have dumped it on a smaller company. Calibre with deDRM works so well that I'd almost forgotten about the struggle to legitimately buy ebooks on Linux, but I'm afraid we may face another period of catching up with the monopolists.

Fingers crossed. I can't find much about Bytebooks apart from their own material.

[danceswithcats]

Bytebooks' parent company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wipro?wprov=sfla1

[Terisa de morgan]

4. Who needs to take action?
You only need to act if:
* You are signing in to Adobe Digital Editions on a new device, or
* You are signing in again after the transition
If Adobe Digital Editions is already authorized on your device, you can continue using it with no changes.

It looks like we are safe at this moment.

[rcentros]

I just got an email from ebooks.com about this. The Adobe "platform transition" page says this takes effect July, 2026. So I guess we've got the rest of May and June to figure it out.

[Martinoptic]

There is another thread about this
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=373596
Could perhaps a mod merge them please?

[Martinoptic]

The bytebooks site has this to say:
4. Who needs to take action?
You only need to act if:
You are signing in to Adobe Digital Editions on a new device, or
You are signing in again after the transition
If Adobe Digital Editions is already authorized on your device, you can continue using it with no changes.

[DrNefario]

So I guess the old sign-in was an AdobeID that was shared with the rest of Adobe's services? I didn't realise that, since I don't use any of them. I guess this is an attempt to decouple ADE from Adobe.

I think I have stripped all my ADE purchases, but I'll be annoyed if this affects my library usage.

[Cactus Chef]

So...what's our Plan B if Adobe ASCM does end up switching to something new/uncrackable? Will OBOK still work to decrypt the books downloaded directly onto my Kobo? Or is that still using the same scheme?

[latepaul]

Never really used OBOK but I'm pretty sure it's completely different DRM so should be unaffected.

[rantanplan]

OBOK only applies to ebooks bought directly from Kobo or their affiliates.

[Cactus Chef]

Originally Posted by rantanplan

OBOK only applies to ebooks bought directly from Kobo or their affiliates.

Right, that's my point. Originally, I was liberating my Kobo purchases by downloading them onto my device and then pulling them off and into Calibre via OBOK.


Then I switched over to the workflow of downloading the ascm file from Kobo onto my desktop and running it through Calibre/De-ASCM instead, because it was faster. If Adobe ADE changes their encryption scheme, I could see that workflow breaking. But the old pull-directly-from-hardware workflow should still work, right?

[JSWolf]

From what I gathered by having a look online is that instead of going to Adobe to create a new UN/PW, you do it via Bytebooks.

In order to have a different DRM, we'd need an updated ADE/RMSDK. Can you see the outcry when many people are unable to read newly purchased eBooks?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

In order to have a different DRM, we'd need an updated ADE/RMSDK. Can you see the outcry when many people are unable to read newly purchased eBooks?

Jon, do you still remember that Adobe's ADEPT DRM comes in multiple flavours? Since Adobe Content Server 5.0, there is a hardened DRM available which required a minimum of RMSDK 10 to decrypt. ACS 6.5 tweaked that a bit to make it even more secure.

You may remember the discussion about this several years back. At that time, it seemed the industry support for Adobe's hardened DRM was only to be found with textbook publishers. In the years since, I have seen 4 examples of ebooks with the resource level DRM and all 4 were university textbooks. I've attached the ACS flags image to this post.

[bluepeter]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

Right, that's my point. Originally, I was liberating my Kobo purchases by downloading them onto my device and then pulling them off and into Calibre via OBOK.


Then I switched over to the workflow of downloading the ascm file from Kobo onto my desktop and running it through Calibre/De-ASCM instead, because it was faster. If Adobe ADE changes their encryption scheme, I could see that workflow breaking. But the old pull-directly-from-hardware workflow should still work, right?

Another option is to use Kobo Desktop. If you download to that (rather than to an e-reader) and run Calibre on the same computer, OBOK will automatically find the books held there, and offer to import them to your Calibre library. I tried that method for the first time yesterday, and found it very smooth. Having said that, OBOK spots everything downloaded to Kobo Desktop, so housekeeping (removal of downloads no longer needed) is beneficial. Otherwise, the list offered by OBOK can get unusably long.

I am, of course, assuming that you use a Windows or Mac computer. I've no idea if this'd work under Linux (+ Wine, presumably).

(I was following your second option, i.e., using the DeACSM plugin, until I tried the alternative described above.)