Adobe Digital Editions

Tech, Tools

Adobe labs has come out with Digital Editions which is supposed to be a completely new way of reading and managing e-books.

Digital Editions is built from the ground up as a lightweight, rich Internet application (RIA). Digital Editions works online and offline, and supports both PDF and XHTML-based content.

This is an early Windows only beta edition released by Adobe to get a quick feedback from users. More details can be found at the FAQ section of Digital Editions. Also you can find a bunch of free e-books here.

My thoughts:

The install was pretty easy and was done online via a flash widget. I was totally impressed by the slick UI (including the Zoom feature).

This is a snapshot of the Library items in Thumbnail mode. (Click to see the enlarged photo)

Snapshot of an PDF opened in Digital Editions.

Digital Editions is a flash based reader and it is pretty fast compared to the normal Acrobat reader. However as noted in the FAQ, this is essentially targeted for reading e-books and lacks many features of Reader.

Since the app is still in Beta, you can notice a few problems immediately.

  1. Open a document and switch to Reading View. UI is very sluggish when you try to resize the window.
  2. For some strange reason, the pages don’t scroll via the mouse wheel.
  3. No keyboard shortcuts 🙁
  4. The title of some of the documents were hiding behind the toolbar.

The future updates should handle all these problems and being a RIA application, the updates should be pushed automatically. The application is really worth trying :). As of now only the windows version is available and a Mac version should be out soon !

Download Adobe Digital Editions