Adobe Digital Editions

A colleague pointed out to me that Adobe had released the 1.0 version of Digital Editions yesterday.

It's an interface for managing, sorting, annotating, and reading electronic text files, not unlike iTunes or iView or Picasa in look & feel. The library view lets you manage your collection (drag-and-drop bookshelves) in thumbnail or list view, while the reading view lets you work within one text at a time, including make annotations. The double page view is a plus. It's a different rendering engine than regular Adobe reader, but I'm not yet sure of the differences. Once review that I read said that the rendering is worse, and apparently there's also a flavor of PDF that can be read only by Digital Editions and not by regular Reader. I usually read ebooks on my Palm device, so I can't compare my past ebook reading experience with this. Digital Editions also supports the EPUB XHTML etext format. Let's hope the ability to create EPUB files using InDesign improves.

The biggest potential flaw is that Digital Editions offers no web portal for locating and downloading books or for automated importing if one expects the iTunes model of ebook discovery, sales, or collection building.