Removing restrictions on Adobe Acrobat PDFs

I bought a PDF e-book this week, and was happily looking forward to printing it out and curling up in the chair out on my deck to read it, as I've done with hundreds of PDFs before over the past 12 years.

So imagine my surprise when I went to hit the "print" button and saw that it was grayed-out and "unavailable". For some silly reason - because there is no good reason - the publishers of the book decided to "disable printing". My guess is that they have somehow gotten the impression that this will protect their copyright in some way. Since the PDF itself can be copied and sent to thousands of people in seconds, I can't see how preventing me from reading it legibly really helps protect the copyright.

I emailed the publisher, who ignored my email completely. A newsgroup post gained me lots of suggestions (including one slightly off-the-wall one, that it's "normal" for a PDF e-book to have printing disabled), including one which worked great. It's a little program called A-PDF Restrictions Remover. It's shareware, and the free trial worked great. If I need it again, I'd be glad to pay $9.99 for it. Highly recommended.