Since the start of the pandemic back in 2020 and the sudden shift to working from home, I have found myself reading far less than before. On one hand I had lost my regular reading time slot, during my commute to and from work on my Kindle, on the other it felt that the real world delivered a whole lot more excitement than before, and fiction couldn’t quite keep up with that. And of course, there are so many more things competing for your time, from TV series to games.
But lately I have joined a new book club, an offshoot of my circle of photographers in Bucharest. Since our next book selection is a work I had already read years ago (and reviewed here), I wanted to read it again. I had it as an e-book, purchased in the Romanian edition from a local publisher. The ePub file, as with most e-books not published in the Kindle store, is DRM-protected, and to activate it and read the book you need Adobe Digital Editions installed. As I have switched laptops since the last time I’ve read ePub files, I hadn’t installed Digital Editions yet on the new laptop, so I downloaded and installed it to get things going.
Which led me to an annoying problem: the app wouldn’t let me log in! It kept refusing to authorize my computer with the error: “Incorrect login ID or password for the selected eBook vendor. Please try again.” Even as a long time has passed since I first configured Digital Editions initially on my previous laptop, I was pretty sure I used an Adobe ID, not some other provider, and I have a single Adobe ID, which I use for their Creative Cloud applications as well. I double-checked the password I had on file by logging out of my Adobe account on the web and logging back in, which worked without issue.
I turned to asking a couple of chatbots for suggestions – I use Mistral Le Chat and Microsoft’s Copilot on and off for various queries, since they do have useful suggestions from time to time. Alas, this time they offered only generic advice such as updating the software, clearing the cache, or contacting Adobe support, which were not relevant since this was a new install already.
But the visit to my Adobe account gave me an idea nonetheless: I had two-factor authentication enabled for my log ins, could this be interfering with Digital Editions? It is after all ancient software by this point, as I don’t think the version changed significantly from about 10 years ago when I first started using it. If Digital Editions is using an older authentication method from before two-factor was introduced, this may be causing this error. So I turned off two-factor in my Adobe settings and, just like magic, I could at once log in to Digital Editions! I imported my old e-Book purchases and they are all unlocked, so everything is working once more.
One final thing to note: I was using Microsoft Authenticator as my two-factor solution for Adobe, but after disabling it, I found out it is no longer supported by Adobe – they are now pushing people to use their own mobile app. So the problem may have been caused by the interaction with the third-party solution – I find it unlikely though, since the 2-factor codes from Microsoft Authenticator were working just fine for the web login. Still, something to keep in mind if you run into similar connections issues with Adobe Digital Editions.
Post a Comment