Adobe's Digital Editions blends Adobe PDF, Policy Server, Flash, and Flex to create publications for many platforms, including cell phones.Today at Adobe MAX in Las Vegas, Adobe announced a pre-release beta of its latest ebook product, Digital Editions.
Digital Editions will be offered initially as a free Windows download of the e-book reader software, which keeps ebooks organized and accessible. Adobe says it eventually plans to support Macintosh, Linux, and a host of portable device platforms. Version 1.0 is slated for release in early 2007, Adobe says.
The Digital Editions will be rights-managed by Adobe and openable in the client software but not Adobe Reader, says Bill McCoy, general manager of the ePublishing Business Unit.
The DRM will be based on Adobe Policy Server. Adobe will also offer a solution for publishers or retailers who prefer to host Adobe Digital Editions themselves. Digital Editions will also support Adobe Content Server DRM, which many lending libraries currently employ.
Publishers who like the service but aren't necessarily PDF-centric can also build e-books in Open eBook format, a reflowable XHTML-based open standard. Features in InDesign will facilitate authoring in that popular Adobe page-layout app, McCoy says. Adobe's hosting service will enable publishers to offer content for free, or to monetize content via retailing or with contextual-based advertising in either PDF or Open ebook formats.
The client -- think "iTunes for e-books" -- is built on Flash and displays covers and contents of ebooks, magazines, and other types of publications. It offers multiple views of covers, from thumbnails of covers to clickable single lines, and clutter-free full-screen views of ebook pages.
While McCoy stopped short of saying the software was modeled after iTunes, he did concede that consumers of e-books aren't necessarily the typical Adobe user; i.e., they may spend much more time using iTunes than, say, Acrobat or Photoshop.
"We tried to make it look like the other apps the target user might be using," McCoy says, adding that he hopes the Digital Editions client will succeed in being as intuitive as iTunes, even though users will use it differently than the popular MP3 library app.
"People tend to organize their music into playlists in kind of an obsessive way. We don't think those kind of use cases will apply to books. You tend to read them and put them on a shelf," he said.
Adobe wanted to make the Digital Editions download thinner than the 20MB+ for Reader, so the inaugural PC Digital Editions client is 2.5MB including Flash Player 9. It installs quickly, without the several steps that downloading and opening an ebook in Reader usually entails.
The client can open any PDF, but it won't support all the features that Reader offers. McCoy guesses that using the Digital Editions client for non-ebook PDFs would get impractical pretty quickly for most people, and they probably won't do it.
McCoy expects most people will read ebooks on their laptops or tablet PCs for the near term, and other mobile devices such as the Sony Reader and PDAs will make inroads into the market. New ones are on the horizon that Adobe Digital Editions will likely support.
The e-book market might never have delivered on the promise offered by the highly publicized Stephen King "Riding the Bullet" e-book six years ago, which flamed out quickly after the PDF's rights management proved no match for hackers. But reports of its demise were premature, says Bill McCoy, general manager of the ePublishing Business Unit at Adobe.
Book publishers in most markets have quietly been building catalogs all along, he says. Consumer demand's coming from lending-library markets as well as the education arena.
E-books work for libraries, because electronic copies cost much less to maintain; no filing in the stacks, no overdue fees (the DRM on a file just expires on the borrower's computer), and books can be checked out 24 hours a day without library staffers or extra hours. McCoy says that more than 1,000 libraries—including the New York Public Library—lend ebooks to patrons.
In the education market, two main selling points fueled the rise of e-books: First, kids don't want to carry backpacks full of paper books if they don't have to, and second, e-books offer rich media that paper can't.
In the high-tech market, too, programmers have found ebooks to be a useful tool. McCoy cites O'Reilly's Short Cuts and Rough Cuts programs as on the vanguard—where readers can buy an early edition or a relevant slice of a book in PDF form instead of the whole fianl release of a book. On the opposite spectrum of readers, romance-novel publisher Harlequin offers 40% of its frontlist in electronic form, as well.
"We believe the market has finally reached a tipping point," McCoy says. "The reality is, despite what I call 'the e-book nuclear winter,' we see some very positive signs we can measure around demand and supply."
