Adobe Digital Editions 1.0: The Ebook Organizer Hits Primetime
Adobe has released Adobe Digital Editions 1.0, a new hybrid on/offline application for acquiring, managing and reading ebooks and other digital publications. With built-in support for Adobe???s PDF format as well as additional content like Flash and eBook formats, Digital Editions could end up becoming a slick replacement for the free Adobe Acrobat Reader.
The application is lightweight, only 3 MB and has a very nice Flash-based installer on the Adobe site which makes for an ultra simple install.
Feature wise the 1.0 release is fairly basic. Books, PDFs and other materials are added to your library by finding them on your hard drive. You can also download items through libraries and other ebook lenders and retailers, but the integration with these services is somewhat limited.
Were Digital Editions able to directly download new ebooks from within the application, I’d be willing to give it high marks. However, at the moment that isn’t possible (at least I couldn’t find a way to do it).
Once you’ve added all your books to your shelf (if you’re looking for some free ebooks to play with, check out the Adobe sample library), the options mirror those of other ebook cataloguing applications on the market (we liked Papers on the Mac a while back). You can view library items by cover or as a list and items are sorted into a main view, borrowed items, purchased items and recently read items.
Browsing and reading books is easy, though a full screen reading mode would be nice. There are a variety of reading modes, single page, facing pages and a zoom mode. The zoom mode provides a nice little windowpane for controlling the zoom level and dragging your way through the page.
Users can add bookmarks, complete with notes and it’s dead simple to print out books if you prefer to read them in physical form.
While Digital Editions is a nice offering and performs well, it lacks any real killer feature to separate it from the pack of eBook organizers that we’ve tested. However, since the eBook game is just getting off the ground we’ll be keeping an eye on Digital Editions to see where Adobe goes with it.
Already Adobe is planning to release a mobile version and, if it’s anything like the desktop version, it will probably be the best option for PDFs on mobile devices. Adobe also says it has plans for eBook reading devices and Sony will reportedly be embedding Digital Editions in its portable reader product line.
Ebooks may still have a way to go before they hit the mainstream, but Adobe claims that 300,000 users downloaded Digital Editions during the initial public beta phase so perhaps the day of the ebook is closer than we think.
The Flash installer:
The library view in thumbnail mode:
Adding an annotated bookmark:
