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New Adobe eReader

by | Jun 20, 2007 | eBooks | 0 comments

Yesterday while I was listening to the CEO from Adobe talk about new technologies during O’Reilly’s Tools of Change Conference, he mentioned the release of a new web app called Adobe Digital Editions. So, I popped on over to the website to check it out. The software is both Windows and Mac compatible. Oh, and it’s pretty cool too. There are a few free eBooks to download, which I did. Plus, one of the great features is its ability to import PDF documents. I have a couple of books in PDF format on my machine, and bringing them into Digital Editions was easy. I haven’t read a lot of material through the viewer yet, so I’m not sure how hard on the eyes an extended session of use might be.

Whether this app survives over time isn’t the important thing. The fact that Adobe continues to evolve in this space is. After all, if the publishing world is using Adobe tools to create printed books, they should be able to easily export their work to a portable eBook format to be read on a multi-platform web app. The technology in Digital Editions is a good option today.

Click here for more insight from Adobe technologist Bill McCoy.

“Print books will eventually go away.”

by | Jun 20, 2007 | eBooks | 0 comments

So says Adobe Systems CEO Bruce Chizen. It might be 5 years from now, or 10 or more, but print is dead.

You can always count on someone dropping that bomb during a digital publishing technologies conference.

While I mostly expected to hear a lot of that kind of stuff at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change Conference, I was surprised to hear something equally brash from Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson. During his keynote today, Chris said, “Free is the new business model of the 21st Century.” You can imagine how that went over with the print publishers in the audience. Heh.

It’s not all shock and awe in San Jose. There is a lot of topic exploration going on, and wrapping your brain around a new and very different business model is always entertaining. The general rule though is Web 2.0. It’s everything, and if you’re not eating, drinking and sleeping it, your still 1.0.

And for some attendees, they seem perfectly fine with that.