Help putting books on iPhone using Stanza (or even eReader)

[niks116]

Hi everyone!

Okay, so I have a bunch of books in Adobe Digital Editions that I would love to be able to put on my iPhone to read on the road. I looked around a bit and it sounds like I should be able to get that done using the iPhone app called Stanza and its desktop counterpart, Stanza desktop. I've got both downloaded and ready for use, but when I launched Stanza desktop and went on File > Open File > digital editions folder (which is where the Adobe digital editions books live), and clicked on the title I wanted, I got a password prompt. It didn't say anything other than 'This PDF file is locked. Please enter the password', and a box under that. Now, I have two questions about that, or rather, one question with two parts :-):

a) Which passowrd am I supposed to enter here? Is it the same that you give when you download a new version of adobe digitaleditions?

b) If it is the same, how can you retrieve that if you don't remember it? Normally, I just use my mac's Keychain Access application when that happens; you enter your admin password and it shows the site or application passowrd you want. But in this case, that doesn't seem to work, it prompts for the admin passowrd, but it doesn't reveal the application password when I click 'allow'.

Couple of things you might need to know, tell me if there's anything I missed:

Running mac OS 10.5.8

Running iphone OS 3.0

Stanza, Stanza Desktop downloaded

eReader application also downloaded.

eBooks come from following sites: ebooks.com, ebookmall.

ebook format: all adobe reader.

That's all I can think of right now 🙂 I guess I'm getting kinda desperate, because I'm leaving on a trip Monday, and I haven't figured it out yet - I think I underestimated the difficulty so I ended up doing this at the last minute! But I already have a lot of stuff to take since it's 15 days, and a mix of business and leisure, formal and casual, so it would be cool to save bulk on the reading material - it's nice to have plenty of boks especially in case some turn out to be duds, but boy do they take up space!

Anyway, if anyone can help me, they can have a whole plateful of cookies to go with my gratitude 😉

[mscullz · Accepted solution]

I've been dealing with the same issue and have sadly discovered that Adobe Digital Edition e-books are using an .acsm extension, which means they are DRM material (Digital Rights Management).  Which means essentially that they are restricted in how they are used and can only be used on Adobe Digital Edition.  And there is no way (yet) to share .acsm files that with DRM onto Stanza, or any other iPhone app for that matter.  I think they're working on this, at least Adobe might be to offer an Adobe Digital Edition app.  Until then, I'm stuck reading on my computer.  Also, I am not sure how to tell beforehand whether an ebook I buy is DRM or not.

One other option would be for you to use the Kindle app on the iPhone and start buying ebooks through Amazon.  Those are transferable.  I think...haven't tried that yet myself.

[niks116]

Thanks for that reply! It was great timing too, because since I wasn't getting any answers I had decided to hedge my bets and post on the mac forums as well, so the fact you saw this now and took the time to reply just saved me a lot of what would have turned out to be a waste of time

It's too bad it's not going to work though. I thought by now they would have figured something out. I already knew we couldn't get something that would look and act like the desktop application, because it works using flash and there's no flash on iphone, but I thought at least you could read the pdfs if you had a password. I guess I feel a little cheated, I bought these books which I am supposed to be able to put on a whole five separate devices, but that turns out not to be the case in practice

I know about the Kindle for iPhone app, and it looks fantastic but unfortunately I can't have that because I don't live in the US and you are required to have a US credit card to buy the books (more DRM! uugh!). It's the same way with the Barnes and Noble for iphone app, which is comparable. The whole experience has a slightly surreal, nineties feel to it, this having to worry about compatibility thing. I began using PCs (not just Windows, personal computers in the literal sense) in 1998, when I was in middle school, and already that was not much of a concern. By the time I got to college which is when I started to do more than browse web pages and type the odd school paper in Word, you no longer had to worry excessively about anything like that. Even the worst of the digital music DRM kerffuffle passed me by, because i was used to using CDs and had a reliable walkman CD player, and by the time I bought my first digital player in '05, it was after the whole Sony rootkit debacle when things cooled off on that front. So this is really the first time I'm running up against the wall of Thtoopid that the whole proprietary DRM thing is. I'm left to wonder when people are going to figure out that making it easier to acquire content legally is going to make it more, not less, likely for people to actually do it. Look at the app store: iphone apps existed before that, for jailbroken/unlocked iphones, but with the Store the numbers exploded! Of course, I guess they can do whatever they please with books to an extent that was unheard of with music cds or even movie dvds - after all, owning a hard copy in cd or dvd means you can easily make a digital copy for yourself, unless you mangle the cd like Sony tried to. But if you own a hard copy of a book, there's just no way to do that. So it's terribly easy for content providers to rip people off on that, and make you pay several times for the same content. Now, I know that paper to digital (books) isn't the same as what is essentially digital of one form to digital of another (cd/dvd to mp3 or mp4), so I would be prepared to cut some slack and pay once for a paper book, and once again for the same book in digital form. But pay several times for various kinds of digital? That sucks. I'm gonna do it, because I read a lot and all, but it's just wrong 😞

Anyway, sorry for the rant DRM is kind of a pet peeve of mine, I've also had it with movies and tv shows. I wish there was a way I could rent or buy TV shows, but I'm not allowed to because of where i live, and I'm reduced to having to watch them on cruddy unreliable chinese sites when I miss an episode of a fave . I hate that!

[ebookaficionado]

the free app called txtr from Germany will also load and run ADE DRM books including pdfs.  the procedure is load txtr then authorize it with Adobe then you set up an account with txtr (does not require a bankcard) then to get books on to the iphone or ipad you up load them to your folder at txtr.com using mac or pc then they show up in your txtr app.  you can then also see and load them then with any andorid tablet using the txtr app as well.

to my knowledge stanza does not do ADE DRM.

in passing, the new feature i am now looking for in any ebook reader is one that will let you backup your bookmarks and annotations. Off topic for now, but Stanza on an ipnone (as nice as it is otherwise) does not do this as far as i can tell and when updating to new OS you can lose these records.

[Frank_Walkowski]

Bluefire reader in the app store will let you read DRM books including Adobe's Digital Editions. Tired it and it works well.