I know this topic is perennial but still confusing inasmuch that some people are referring to pdf document viewing (which seems problematic enough sometimes), but what my problem is that there is no pdf reader for encrypted drm-protected books from ebooks.com.
It is strange as so many books are in pdf format but Adobe say only Palm devices are compatible (welcome to the present, and WM 5.0). While their desktop reader works fine, is there any way around errors on pocketpc (permission expired errors)?
Or some hack? Adobe say they will provide a reader if there is enough demand!

http://pocketxpdf.sourceforge.net/

Version 0.4 has support for password-protected PDFs.

Adobe Reader 2 SHOULD work with those, which makes the errors you're getting odd. You did download the WM2003 one from the Adobe/Macromedia site, yes?

 

I use password-protected pdf files all the time that I create on my desktop, but I think that's a totally different matter to this ebook drm encryption (that's what I meant by the confusion).
Adobe Reader does work on my Axim, but even if it did read these ebooks as it is, it would never compare to the display of ereader.com, mobipocket or MS Reader, what with all the scrolling around - same for pocketxpdf (and Clearvue), which seems to take an age to redraw the next page, not exactly the touch-the-screen page flipping of the others.
It seems to me that the overrespresentation of ebooks with pdf format is historical, and they were never intended to be read on other than Palm devices or desktops. Unfortunately some of the specialty books on my wishlist are only in that format!

Take a look at Repligo.

Just convert your PDFs to Repligo's proprietary format (.rpo)
Then use the free Repligo Viewer v2.5, it is much btter than any of the .pdf viewers out there.

Thank you, a program I never even heard of - while not free, it does Word and plain text really nicely, but a bit erratic with forms and some fonts. It crashed on many of my larger files (a component has encountered a problem) and of course just hung again and again 13 pages into the dreaded ebook.com pdf book.
Some publishers don't authorize the print option which it uses for conversion.
All-in-all I'm beginning to think that while there are some viable alternatives mentioned in this thread for pdf files in general, drm-protected ebooks in pdf should be avoided for Axim people. Adobe so bloatware on the scale of Real Player, not ebook customer support.