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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Comment by
Dustin
4 Jul 2007
Hi! Love your site, but the RSS feeds (at least the several explicitly marked “rss” and the “add to Google”) dont work — Feedburner says the feed is empty. I’ve searched and searche your site and have been unable to find a link to contact you directly (add that!) so I’m telling you here.
Keep up the good work, and help me keep up with it too!
Comment by
Tom Colvin
4 Jul 2007
DUSTIN: Thanks for your feedback — enormously valuable. I’ll jump on the RSS issue right away. I myself do get a Feedburner alert email the morning after I post anything new, which is 2-4 times a week usually. Something in the links must have broken.
You can reach me at: tomcolvin @ gmail.com [without the spaces, of course].
Look forward to some discussions here, via email or perhaps even other sites.
Tom
Comment by
Tom Colvin
4 Jul 2007
MORE FOR DUSTIN: I’ve done a quick check of RSS links. Strangely, some work, some don’t.
Clicking the Feedburner button at top left sidebar seems to be working. In fact, someone has signed up there within the past day or two, I notice.
Also the buttons to subscribe at bottom of left sidebar via Google and Rojo seem to be working. Yahoo, however, reported a hiccup, and the others require member log-in [and I'm not subscribed to them myself].
The links specifically marked RSS FEED are acting very strangely, as you reported. Two of those links yield a page from Feedburner suggesting feed problems, while the RSS COMMENTS link does seem to be working.
I’ll do some more work and hopefully solve it all. Unfortunately, I’m travelling Thurs-Sunday so may not get it sorted out until later next week.
Tom