Help with obtaining book from acsm file

[unifaerie01]

I have purchased books from Kobo for the last 18 months. I store all of my books as backup on an external hard drive so d/l as acsm and then add books to my folder.

Today  attempted to reload my books as the external hard drive they were stored on has been lost.

I was unable to obtain the books with the acsm as E_LIC_ALREADY_FULFILLED_BY_ANOTHER_USER. Yet this is the only laptop they have been loaded to.

I tried an alternative id and Kobo also attempted to reset all files with no success! ADE uninstalled, installed, de-authotised, authorised - no joy 😞

Any help please!

[sjpt]

Do you know exactly what AdobeID was used when you first purchased these books?

Was the computer authorized with a specific Adobe ID, or did you leave ADE (Digital Editions) to 'run without authorization'?

If you were running without explicit authorization when you first downloaded the books,

it may not be possible to get out of the hole unless Kobo can allow you to download effectively new copies.

Do you have any of the .epub files for those purchased books?

If so, you can check how it is authorized.

You may be able to do that with ADE and asking for information on the book (ctrl-I).

It may refuse to give the information, in which case the orignal ID can be extracted but it is a little awkward.

I will fill in detail if you find you might need it.

[unifaerie01]

As far as I can remember I used my original id. If you can give me instructions for extracting the id I would be very grateful.

I am just intrigued that I have not purchased any books with my new id and yet there are a few of the books that are extracted from the acsm?

[sjpt · Accepted solution]

You cannot see details specific to your ID in the .acsm file.  The file .acsm is a token; once you use it to download a .epub file the .epub file is encrypted for your current ID, and the server remembers the association between the .acsm token and the AdobeID. 

When you try to redownload a .epub from the same .acsm file, the server will check your current AdobeID.  If it doesn't match, it will give the   E_LIC_ALREADY_FULFILLED_BY_ANOTHER_USER message you have seen.

To see the AdobeID from an encrypted .epub file:

1. Open the file as a zip archive. 
   If you have a good zip archive manager like 7zip you can do this directly.
   Otherwise, you must rename the .epub file to a .zip file to open it.
2. Find the file rights.xml inside the zip; probably META-INF\rights.xml
3. Inside that file, you will find a section that looks something like <user>urn:uuid:ff2ddc22-eca0-46c6-a84d-xxxxxxxxxxxx</user>
   That is the AdobeID.

I had forgotten that the ID was stored only in its internal form, and not by the username that belongs to the ID.

However, if you are on ADE2.0 you can use Help/Authorization Information (ctrl-shift-I, cmd-shift-I on Mac) which will show you both the external username and the internal ID.

At least you can check that way if ADE thinks you have the correct AdobeID for the book; but if you haven't it won't remind you of the username you used.

I don't know if Adobe service are able to find the userid if you can give them that internal ID.

Good luck.

[unifaerie01]

Have finally convinced Kobo to reset my acsms - I think! Waiting for a definitive reply from the next level of authorisation???

I will gather the above info once the new files are available. Thank you so much for all of your help 🙂