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Have I mentioned before how much I hate Adobe products? Oh. Yes. I have. And with the same post title, too.

This time the problem has to do with Adobe Reader, and specifically its DRM functionality for ebooks. In order to be able to read an ebook, you need to authorize your local copy of Adobe Reader or Adobe Digital Editions (the software you use to read/manage ebooks post version 8 of Reader) with their central database. And of course, you only get a limited number of activations.

Now, this is all fine and dandy, but the problem occurs, for example, when you reinstall the OS on your computer. You have to reactivate the reader in order to be able to read your ebooks, but each activation you run gets logged as a different activation, even when you’re doing it from the same computer. So in no time you’ve racked up your maximum number of activations, and you’re out of luck.

You’d think solving this would be as simple as removing these bogus or no-longer-useful activations from your activation profile, right? Not so fast, bub. Get this: there is no way to deactivate an installation of Reader except from within the software itself, and if you forget to deactivate the software before you reformat and reinstall, don’t even bother praying, because even God can’t help you.

My activation profile contains 6 activations, 1 from a computer I sold, and 4—count ‘em, 4—from a computer I just installed Leopard on. That’s 5 useless activations that I can’t get rid of. And those ebooks I just spent $15 on? Unusable. Not to mention the several-hundred-dollars’ worth of ebooks I’d already bought.

This piece of garbage is almost as annoying as Adobe’s website, which is so poorly designed that it took me a half an hour to even find out that I was SOL. God, I hate these people. Words cannot describe it. Flames…heaving…aaarrrrrgggghh.