You’d think someone one among the world’s thousands of software book authors--enterprising as they are known to be--would have come up with a tome on Adobe Reader by now, considering its potential readership base in the hundreds of millions.

They haven’t. Until now. Ted Padova, a favorite author among the PDF faithful, has taken on the project, in conjunction with Adobe Press and Peachpit. Tentatively titled “Adobe Reader Unleashed” and scheduled for January publication, the book delves into Reader’s new raft of features--including review and commenting tools available when an Acrobat Pro licensee starts an email document review.

“It’s grown beyond a simple PDF viewer to a pretty powerful application, Padova tells PDFzone. “I felt that Reader users needed an aftermarket book to detail a lot of the information on new features and in general things on using Adobe Reader.”

Things users might not figure out on their own about the new version, including:

• The ability to set the resolution for screen shots you take in Reader
• New ways of exporting text
• Attach files to a PDF in Acrobat 7, and the PDF becomes sort of a secure job “jacket” or “binder” for it, the contents of which Reader users can extract
• Pros and cons of the “quick launch” of Reader 7

How does the book deal with the fact that some Reader features--such as applying digital signatures, signing and saving filled-in forms, and review and commenting tools--are only made available to Reader users when enabled by Acrobat or LiveCycle server software upstream? After all, some of the book’s readers will see some features, while they will remain hidden to others.

Padova--who, at this writing, is in author review of the manuscript--says that he made it clear by referring to “different kinds of PDFs” that Reader can open. He adds that the book encourages Reader users to communicate with their company’s powers that be to set up LiveCycle forms software, if they see an interesting application for forms use in their environment.

At the least, he says, Reader users should communicate with Acrobat users they know and remind them to make review and commenting tools available when it’s appropriate; his book might be the only source of knowledge that these tools exist in some workgroups.

“If you stop and think about it--and this is something that Adobe really doesn’t want to communicate--realistically, one person in an office that employs 5,000 people can have Acrobat Professional and the rest can participate in email document reviews,” says Padova, who calls the new commenting features “by far” the hottest new wrinkle for Reader 7.

While plug-ins are available for Reader, Padova decided that enumerating them was beyond the scope of the book. He did, however, devote pages to free PDF-creation utilities available to both Windows and Mac users.

The book, Padova says, not only can benefit those in among the 700 million desktop Reader users looking to get the most out of the free application, but also IT managers who need a detailed overview of Reader 7’s functions for fitting it in to their enterprise document needs--especially those using or considering LiveCycle servers--as well as the Acrobat users who might want to see what Reader users downstream will see when circulating PDFs.

“I had all three populations in mind when developing content for the book,” he says. “Reader is a pretty sophisticated application Adobe’s been giving away freely to users all over.”

Pre-order it here and never mind the yet-to-be-updated title and release date.