Many publishers were not happy when Adobe announced nearly two years ago that ACS was going off the market, especially since it not only did not announce a successor product but also moved its DRM technology development over to the enterprise-targeted LiveCycle product line.  Yet the community most disadvantaged by the demise of ACS was public libraries, because ACS was the only DRM for eBooks that supported file-based library lending (as opposed to the self-contained, browser-based approaches of NetLibrary and ebrary).  That community also includes Overdrive, the Cleveland-based company that has emerged as the leading eBook service provider for public libraries in the United States.

The new format takes a couple of significant steps forward in e-publishing.  One is the incorporation of Flash for animation and video, which became a natural step after Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia in April of last year. 

The other is an attempt to do what publishers have long been asking for: to somehow wed the page-layout-oriented PDF universe with structured, reflowable text enabled by XML technology.  These two mindsets have been virtually antithetical to one another (think Conde Nast vs. technical journals), but publishers looking to repurpose print-oriented publications onto digital devices have wanted them to merge.  This is a very hard problem, and Adobe isn't quite there yet: XHTML is not really XML; instead it is primarily a syntactically cleaner version of HTML represented in XML.

Digital Editions Protection Service uses user ID-based authentication rather than the combination of user and device authentication used in ACS.  This makes for a more transparent user experience -- no more "device activations" -- but it also removes some limitations to content use on which some segments of the publishing industry have insisted.  ACS limited content usage to a fixed maximum number of devices per user.  Educational publishers in particular have been adamant about avoiding sharing of digital texts among multiple students, so that every student in a given class would not need to purchase the text.  Limiting the number of devices on which a file can be read is a way of containing (if not eliminating) this problem.  Authentication based solely on user IDs means that students could probably cheat as long as multiple students aren't trying to read the same eBook simultaneously. 

At the same time, we can see why Adobe designed Digital Editions Protection Service this way.  The device activation scheme in ACS resulted in massive tech support overhead for Adobe, which most likely made ACS unprofitable for the company, especially given how few licenses it sold.  If Adobe risks alienating certain segments of the publishing industry, it should be secure in the knowledge that it is helping others move into the digital world and joining the recent spate of new activity in e-publishing, an industry that has been effectively dormant for the past few years.

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