14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe is a company known to most people, and despite the fact that its products list is really long, they keep coming with new ones from time to time. Today, they launched a new digital publishing application for the Mac platform, making it available as a beta download at the Adobe Labs website. Since this is a completely new application for all of us, I guess it would be a good idea to see what can be done with it, don't you agree?
Adobe Digital Editions is "a new, exciting Rich Internet Application (RIA) built from the ground up for digital publishing", according to Adobe's FAQ. With this program you can simplify the process of acquiring, managing and consuming eBooks and other kinds of digital publications.
As it happens with new products from Adobe, the Digital Editions software has been made public to get feedback from the users and improve it as much as possible until the first official "1.0" final version release. Using Digital Editions beta, you can use PDF ebooks protected by Adobe Content Server (ACS) DRM solution, a technology no longer supported by Acrobat and Acrobat Reader 8.
Digital Editions was born from the need of ebook consumers to have a lightweight solution available, since Adobe Reader gets more and more features with each version, and its speed also suffers, especially when it runs on older systems.
Adobe's Digital Editions works online and offline, being able to handle PDF and XHTML-based content, and includes Flash Player 9, all inside a small 2.5MB package. The Mac version comes as a Universal Binary able to run smoothly on PowerPC and Intel-based Macs, and requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later.