Saturday, March 22, 2008

How to Read Adobe Digital Editions on Mac OS X 10.5.x

I've got a bunch of old ebooks from Adobe with DRM (don't read me?) protection, which I fittingly wanted to read. I first got these books back in 2003 or 2004, and over that time I've had plenty of issues in opening them. I had to pluck around the depths of the internets at least twice before to resolve issues in opening these ebooks.

Well, I had to do it once again. I came to find out that Adobe's official position is that Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard) is not presently supported." However, digging a bit further into their message boards, I found that that isn't exactly the case; you can in fact read them on Leopard, it just requires a work-around.

The work-around is as follows (thanks to Adobe forum member reklessen for posting this work-around):
        1.        Use Safari to open this page. Although I didn't personally test anything, there may be issues when using other browsers.
        2.        From the "Select a Version" pull-down menu on that web page, select "10.2.8 - 10.4.2".
        3.        Download this earlier version of Acrobat Reader
        4.        Quit all Adobe software.
        5.        Install the version of Adobe Reader that you just downloaded.
        6.        Open Adobe Reader 7.0.9.app, go to File > Digital Editions > Authorize Devices, and go through the steps to authorize the computer you're using.
        7.        Make sure the computer you are using is listed in the list of authorized devices at the bottom of digital editions accounts webpage.
        8.        Open any digital editions with Adobe Reader 7.0.9.app by either dragging and dropping the digital edition on the app's icon in the dock, control-clicking the digital edition file and selecting "Open With" Adobe Reader 7.0.9.app, or selecting File > Open within Adobe Reader 7.0.9.app.
Afterwards, ignore all of the pleas from Adobe updating software to update to version 8 or any other higher version, and you should be able to continue reading any of digital editions you have simply by opening them with Adobe Reader 7.0.9.app.