Adobe Digital Reader and Skim: New Directions for e-Readers
Late last month, Adobe unveiled its new Adobe Digital Editions e-reader. It’s so new that it’s not even yet listed on the Adobe homepage.
Adobe Digital Editions is not a replacement for the traditional Adobe Acrobat Reader. While Acrobat Reader remains primiarily a business and communications tool, Digital Editions is designed expressly for the emerging market for e-books. It has a dramatically different look: an almost entirely black screen, with two primary screen modes — a bookshelf view which can display several libraries of e-books, and the reader view, which can display two facing book-like pages.
Newscomers may find the reader perplexing. There are, at least for the moment, no handy user instructions. One must search over the screen to inconspicuous “handles” which open up lists of commands, scale the reader window, import e-books. My preliminary evaluation suggests that the software demands larger screens to be fully useful. Or perhaps it will be targeted at tablet computers, with their vertical orientation. Or, intriguingly, perhaps there’s new hardware in the wings that will be a perfect match for the software.
At the very least, the entry of Adobe into the e-book reader arena tells us that this area of publishing is clearly moving forward. Adobe even has a section at the Digital Editions website where one will find e-books — while the section is currently virtually empty, I’m guessing the offerings will rapidly grow, with many low-cost, as well as free e-books. Additionally, rumors are flying about a soon-to-be-announced e-book reader developed by Amazon Books. The heavy weights are beginning to move in.
Mac users are not without news. Skim is a PDF Reader for OS X, currently in early development with version 0.4.1. Besides allowing users to read PDF pages, they can also highlight portions of text and write annotations and notes. This reader is aimed primarily at researchers.
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