Adobe Digital Editions Will Change How You View E-Books

By Bill Kasdorf, Vice President, Apex

Now that we not only download but actually read so many documents onscreen, wouldn’t it be nice to have one easy-to-use system to store, organize, access, and annotate them? Whether you’re online or not? Whether they’re PDF or XML? Well, that’s just what Adobe has created with its recently released Digital Editions 1.0.

Adobe Digital Editions is for the consumer—the end-user—not the publisher. It doesn’t have all of Acrobat’s bells and whistles; it’s not for creating content or manipulating it or collaborating. Instead, it’s a very small (under 3 MB) downloadable program for storing and accessing e-books. It actually handles all kinds of digital publications—I tried it on a chapter, a press release, and a presentation, and it worked like a charm (as long as they’re in the right file formats; more on that below).

Best of all, it’s free. Version 1.0 works on both Windows and Mac; a Linux version is in the works, as are localized versions in five languages. The Sony Reader has announced its support, and Digital Editions will be implemented on mobile and other devices as well.

So what’s the catch? Adobe plans to sell ads in future versions (which it promises to make "tasteful, minimally distracting, and useful"—hmm, we’ll see), with a premium version (price TBD) that will enable you to disable the ads.

If this is so simple to use, and you can so easily access files with it, how is Adobe going to get publishers who want to protect their content to cooperate? Answer: ADEPT, the Adobe Digital Editions Protection Technology, a hosted digital rights management (DRM) service that supports purchase, subscription, library lending, and ad-supported models. In fact, quite a few publishers and e-book distributors have already announced their support of Adobe Digital Editions—enthusiastically, I might add.

And what about obsolescence? Adobe thought of that too. Adobe Digital Editions is a Rich Internet Application (RIA), which means that every time you use it when you’re online, it checks to see if you’ve got the latest version and makes you update. (It takes less than two minutes on a broadband connection, and it only happens if there’s been a new release.) But don’t miss this important point: It works when you’re offline (in an airplane, for example); it’s not working through a browser. Digital Editions is a whole separate program, with a clean, simple interface free of the clutter your browser distracts you with. In fact, it’s downright handsome. It’s a pleasure to use.

And finally, let’s get back to that little bombshell from the beginning: Digital Editions works with both PDF and XML. I’ve long been an advocate of both formats and have always seen them as complementary. PDF is for finished pages—ideally, good-looking ones, with beautiful fonts, graphics, colors, and well-designed layouts. XML is for reflowable, reusable, reformattable content—and a whole lot more. Adobe Digital Editions is built to work both ways, with fixed, finished pages (PDF) or reflowable content (XML).

Of course, if you know much about XML, you’re thinking, "There’s no way this could work with any old XML." Right. What Adobe Digital Editions supports is what should soon become the lingua franca for e-books: the new Open Publication Structure (OPS 2.0) that is about to be released by the International Digital Publishing Forum. IDPF is the new name for the Open eBook Forum, and OPS 2.0 is the successor to OEBPS 1.2. The files it produces use the .epub extension, so this is also called the EPUB format. (My next Tech Topics article will be on these new standards.) Because Digital Editions is based on both XHTML and the DTBook model (the subject of my previous article), it provides an excellent standard for e-books that can be generated from almost any publisher’s XML. OPS/EPUB hasn’t even been officially released yet, but it has already gotten several major endorsements—not the least of which was Adobe Digital Editions.

This means that you can populate your library of e-books and other documents with both PDF (ideally as PDF/A) and XML (as OPS 2.0) files, organize them interchangeably on customizable bookshelves within your Library, and interact with them pretty much the same way within the Reading environment. (One difference: When you’re reading an XML document, you can change the font size and it will reflow; you can zoom in on PDFs, but you can’t reflow them.) You can bookmark them, highlight them, annotate them—and as proof that Adobe really, really gets XML, this information is stored in an open XML format "to facilitate future social networking features." That’s a quote from Bill McCoy’s blog at Adobe. He’s not only the general manager of Adobe’s epublishing business, he was also an active participant in the development of the new OPS/EPUB XML format.

Although Adobe says that PDF files should be in the PDF/A format (designed for archiving and compatible way back to Acrobat 5), I’ve found that I can put almost any PDF file into Digital Editions. Sometimes they don’t display exactly right; for example, transparency and drop shadows don’t work. But the pages otherwise display just fine, so unless the document is highly designed, you probably wouldn’t notice the difference. The same is not the case for XML; you can’t even access standard HTML files in Digital Editions, they have to be .epub files that conform to the OPS spec (which is not hard to achieve, since OPS/EPUB is basically XHTML).

The bottom line: Adobe Digital Editions is extremely well thought out and based on standards that should have real staying power. It’s elegant, clear, and a pleasure to use. The user interface is so intuitive, with useful menus popping up just when you need them, that the best way to get acquainted with Adobe Digital Editions is just to download it and dive in. Have fun!

Bill Kasdorf is a past SSP president, general editor of The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing, and SSP News Tech Topics department editor. Please contact Bill if you have an idea for a Tech Topics article.