Adobe Digital Editions Video

Adobe Digital Editions Video Transcript

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>> Digital music has iTunes. Digital videos, Democracy Player, iTunes. But books? Is there any love for the halting ebook movement? A bit out of the blue, Adobe just came back with a resounding yes. Hi, I'm Seth Rosenblatt from CNETdownload.com. And today I'm going to talk about Adobe Digital Edition. It's a brand new program that lets you organize and read your eBooks as long as they're in a PDF or EPUB format. The installation process is simple, but a bit unfamiliar because it's Flash base. There's no exe file. From the Download.com review, click on the download now link. That takes you to Adobe's Digital Editions page. From there, click on the screenshot and follow the instructions. Even though the program is new, Adobe wisely chose a familiar interface. On the left nav below last read, a play list style feature called Bookshelves organizes your books. All items shows everything. Borrowed and purchased are nonfunctional at the moment. And recently read so far seems to be the same as all items. But the options button at the bottom lets you create a new bookshelves such as classics, then you just drag and drop to add titles. The program is Flash based, so right clicking doesn't get you very far. An arrow appears when you mouse over a book. Clicking gives you options to open, delete or look at additional info about the book. The list view also shows this information. Last thing in library view, the library button here includes add item, which you'll need to add any ebook stored on your hard drive. In my be it oh so ever humble opinion, the library view is the stronger half of the program. The reading view could use some work. Jump to reading view on the toolbar's left and you get additional book info and book marks in the nav. Bookmarks can be created in three places. At the bottom of the nav with the plus icon or in options, and on the toolbar with the bookmark icon. But you can only mark pages, not specific lines of text. The toolbar gives you the page number, a print icon, a bookmark icon and we're just going to skip these middle tools for a sec. At the end here, you can search the text for specific words or phrases. The middle tools change depending on what format ebook you're looking at. Here's a Sherlock Holmes and a Dracula I grabbed for free off the Adobe website. The Holmes lets you change the font size, but the Dracula perhaps because it's a bit evil doesn't. Instead, it has buttons for fit double pages, fit single page, fit to width and custom fit. Frankly, it's confusing enough to give anyone a fit. Notably there's also a standard zoom tool that's missing. Digital Editions is a good start towards making eBooks a serious electronic format. Too bad, we don't have a good ebook reader though. For CNETdownload.com, I'm Seth Rosenblatt and this has been a first look at Adobe Digital Editions. ^M00:02:53 [ Music ]