DRMed ebooks cost lots and break when you upgrade Acrobat

My friend Espen, in Oslo, writes in with the story of a friend of his who bought an ebook for $172 (yes, a hundred and seventy two DOLLARS), then upgraded his version of Acrobat and lost the ability to read it. No one answers his tech support emails and his $172 ebook is just a jumble of encrypted bits on his harddrive. This is the outcome of DRM: it only punishes the people who are willing to shell out money for digital works, and it drives them to seek either infringing editions or comepeting, free information.

In January I bought my first ebook (ISBN: B0000E68Z2), which is
published by Wiley. I have one copy on my laptop and a backup on my
external harddrive. Last week, I downloaded and installed Adobe
Professional (writer 6.0) from our company network (Norwegian School
of Management, BI) – during the installation some files from the
Adobe version that I downloaded and installed when I bought the ebook
(from Amazon.com UK) were deleted. Since then, I have not been able
to access my ebook – I have tried to get help from our computer staff
but they have not been able to help me.

Adobe thinks that I'm using another computer, while I'm not – and
it didn't help to activate the computer through some Adobe DRM
Activator stuff. Now I have spent at least 10 hours trying to access
my ebook – hope you can help

Link

(Thanks, Espen!)