There are several threads in this support forum asking all likely the same question, how to copy text passages from an epub opened in Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) to another application or text editor like Word, Notepad, Open Office ...
Copying from adobe digital editions
Re: Copying text to my term papers. Ctrl+C doesn't work. Help!!
how do I copy text from an epub book?
Digitl Edition EBook copy text option not available
... but remain unanswered. That's a little odd, due to the fact that it seems to be an issue for a bunch of people.
Is it just impossible or a bug in ADE?
I use latest version ADE 4.5.1 on Windows 7. The tested epubs have no DRM. And they are not blocked by Windows.
What I found out so far, if I open the same epub in an older version (ADE 3.0) I can copy and paste text without any problems. But if I open it in ADE 4.5.1 I can only copy once and then the option is greyed out in the context menu (also ctrl + c doesn't work). So for every copy paste I need to reopen the ebook. So it is useless for scientific work, where you need to cite a lot from different books.
Is there a workaround or will there be a patch from Adobe? Or can someone suggest a similar eReader application for desktop users?