Adobe Digital Editions Beta Launched - Digital Reading Market Hots Up
Following hot on the heels
of the Microsoft-powered
NY Times Reader, Adobe has released Adobe Digital Editions
Beta - a Rich Internet Application (RIA) for digital publishing and reading. The
product enables users to acquire, read, and manage content such as eBooks and other
digital publications. This market is ramping up quickly in late 2006, as the Sony Reader is also in beta form currently.
Last week I spoke to Bill McCoy, General Manager of the ePublishing Business Unit at Adobe, to talk about the new product.
Adobe Digital Editions is designed to be a lightweight, standards supporting digital reader - and is focused on the consumer market. Bill said electronic reading "is reaching a tipping point" in the market right now.
As with the NY Times Reader, the Adobe product reflows content and makes readibility of e-content easier. The product is also cross-platform - working on PCs, mobiles, PDAs and dedicated ebook devices. Also the Digital Editions beta includes integration with Adobe Acrobat 8 and Reader 8, which can install and launch Digital Editions from within their user interface.
Adobe Digital Editions is built on the Flash platform - a key difference to the Times Reader, which is built on Microsoft's WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) technology. So Adobe's solution will work on Windows, Mac OS/X and Linux (although currently the beta is only available on Windows). Perhaps the biggest difference though is the range of content the Adobe product supports - PDF (obviously), XHTML, and Flask SWF for rich content. Bill stressed that these are open standards for content, unlike the Microsoft product which uses a proprietary content format.
There will also be opportunities for publishers to make money from their electronic publications, via contextual advertising in Adobe Digital Editions.
In terms of DRM, it does have it - a new one called Adobe Digital Editions Protection Service, based on Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server. It also works with Adobe Content Server eBook DRM. The DRM sounds a bit daunting, but those familiar with the ebook market (and indeed music too) will know that DRM is an almost inescapable part of the user experience.
There will be associated authoring tool support from Adobe, coming out in the first half of 2007. Other future plans include social networking (shared annotation and reading lists), browser-based operation (e.g. widgets that bring the Digital Editions reading experience to the browser), "push" delivery of content subscriptions and webcasts, mobile and device versions, and new ways to combine traditional text-based and interactive content.
Adobe Digital Editions beta is available for free download from the Adobe Labs Web site.
Here are some further screenshots of the product:
1 TrackBacks
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2834
FOLLOW RWW ON TWITTER
RECENT JOBS
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
and no mac support with this interesting news? bummer...
sounds to me like they all noticed the zino reader
Posted by: blinking8s | October 24, 2006 2:44 AM
Im wondering if its built on the Apollo framework, All the features sugest it to be.
Posted by: Campbell | October 24, 2006 5:52 AM
Now this may sound foolish... but why exactly do we need such a reader. This format is so unfriendly to use. what is need is not a way to display a book in it's original layout on a pc screen but a converter that will reorganize the information and images in the book so we can easily read them on a pc.
Also what's the big deference between this and the acrobat reader? That it can read xhtml? I knowan excellent application that can read PDF's flash files and even xhtml it's called a browser.
Posted by: Avi | October 24, 2006 7:59 AM
Hots up? How does that relate to heats up?
Posted by: Lloyd D Budd | October 24, 2006 11:38 AM
blinking8s. You may want to check out http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/digitaleditions/ where you will see:
"Will Digital Editions run on Macintoshes?
Yes. A Macintosh version of Adobe Digital Editions is under development and a beta will be released as soon as it's ready."
Posted by: WCHumphries | October 25, 2006 8:22 AM
So Adobe have worked out what to do with the otherwise redundent FlashPaper?
Posted by: Benb | October 26, 2006 1:04 AM
Finally... hurrah!
Posted by: Ivan Minic | October 30, 2006 5:25 AM
Nice find...I will probably be implementing this at work.
Posted by: listikal | October 30, 2006 5:29 AM
Excellent find! light weight yeah!
Posted by: GM | October 31, 2006 9:31 AM