Adobe revisits e-books

Adobe Systems is set to release a beta of an e-book viewer and manager called Digital Editions at its Max 2006 customer conference in Las Vegas.

The software is meant to be a stripped-down and more flexible e-book reader, compared with its current PDF-based reader, Adobe Reader, it said.

Digital Editions is a 2.5MB free download that works as an add-in to Adobe's Flash Player 9. The software can read PDF pages as well as XHTML-formatted content, which makes it suitable for both longer texts, such as books, and shorter texts, such as magazine articles. Digital publishers can combine text with Flash videos and animations.

Electronic books were touted in the late 1990s as a replacement for paper books but they have never become widely used. Companies continue to create specialised digital text-reading devices, such as the recently released Sony Reader.

Adobe sees the potential for more mainstream adoption, mainly via laptop PCs or PDAs rather than via specialised readers. More people are consuming digital content online, such as videos, and more publishers are adopting digital formats, said Bill McCoy, general manager of Adobe ePublishing Solutions

He said: "We see there are bright spots in e-book adoption. And consumers, especially the younger generation of digital consumers, expect to get content digitally."

The first release of Digital Editions will be a beta test version for Microsoft Windows, Adobe said. It is expected to be released in a final version early next year.

A Macintosh version is due later this year. A Linux version is also planned but it will not be ready until after the Adobe Player 9 for Linux is released in the first quarter next year.

Adobe expects to create versions of the software for mobile devices as well.

Martin LaMonica writes for CNET News.com