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Adobe Takes On Microsoft Role In E-book Market
ericatcw writes "Barnes & Noble, Sony and other e-book vendors may have the manufacturing muscle, but the brains directing the challenge against Amazon.com's Kindle eBook Reader is Adobe Systems. Like Microsoft, Adobe has built a formidable ecosystem of partners to whom it supplies software such as its encryption/DRM-creating Adobe Content Server. Adobe paints Amazon as being like Apple: secretive and playing badly with others. Amazon argues it just ain't so, and takes a jab, along with other critics, at Adobe's alleged open-ness."
There's an e-book market?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Adobe just provides a platform; it's up to the producers to decide what protection (if any) to place on the documents.
There certainly won't be a market until the prices of the readers come down. $300? You gotta be crazy. Even at $50 they would in any case likely never entice me completely away from the real thing.
Or till there's a cross platform standard format. If I have the option of using an e-book on my cell phone, laptop, desktop, pda etc without having to purchase a half dozen different versions I'm all for it. But buying a file that only works on one device seems like a bad idea.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
$300 for a device that's easier on the eyes than an LCD screen, and can store 1500 books? I think that's a perfectly reasonable price for what you get.
So Amazon thinks through a problem and designs an elegant solution, takes care of the software, hardware, and marketing.
Adobe just wants to inject their proprietary technology into a process and sit back and enjoy the royalties.
Screw Adobe. They don't even do any coding here in the US anymore.
The story title reads: "Adobe Takes On Microsoft Role In E-book Market" yet the only reference I found on Microsoft, on both linked articles, is this:
Though Adobe may balk at the comparison, its role in the e-book market is similar to Microsoft's in the PC market: a builder of a semi-open ecosystem of partners to whom it sells publishing tools.
So, what does Microsoft have to do with both articles really ?
Oh yeah, because Adobe Flash sure plays nice on Mac OS X. /sarcasm
I agree. The first change they need to make is to allow Flash to work reliably over a LAN. For software whose purpose is to create internet content, it seems a little ridiculous that their official policy is to not support any type of LAN use in any context.
If anyone has Flash installed and wants to see what I'm talking about, open up Flash and use it to create or open a FLA file on a network share. With the file open, remove access to the network share. Now marvel as it's not possible to save the file anywhere, even on local storage. Even if the connection to the share gets re-established. This is how Flash has always worked, at least since I started using Flash 4, and that behavior remains in CS4 (Flash 10).
You're probably right about the codebase, but I would be equally surprised if they've owned the Flash property for this long without rewriting it, considering the glaring problems.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
fired without cause as part of a witch hunt on a security breach.
Unfortunately, this sentence nullifies your credibility. This is what sociopaths say when they're fired for everything. This is what all my ex-con buddies say when they can't hold down a job for more than 6 months. It's what 16 year olds say when they get fired for doing 10 minutes of work in an hour, because they were too busy texting their friends about the movie on Friday. This is what unclever people say when they tried to pull something clever, got caught, and refused to believe that someone could see through the cleverness of their crappy plans.
I'm not saying that you fit into these categories, or that you did something wrong. Rather, I'm saying, you are simply using the same wording that they ALL use, which immediately triggers off "BULLSHIT" alarms in anyone over the age of 18 who doesn't use this line -- so don't bother with ever using it. Remove that line and your post carries much greater impact.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Postscript (and by extension, PDF) doesn't reflow at all, which makes it a pain to use for different sized small screens like ebook readers.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
PDF isn't an ebook format. It's an e-paper format. It gets used for ebooks fairly often, but it's not very good at it.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
The main problem with PDFs is simple: People seem to think 'pages' are a good idea for book. They aren't. The are an artifact of using a printing press, and are the best way available for paper books to be assembled.
Books are stretches of text, possibly divided into chapters. Pages are interruptions in the reading experience. Pages that aren't the same size as your reading area just interrupt your reading experience multiple times.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
There certainly won't be a market until the prices of the readers come down. $300? You gotta be crazy. Even at $50 they would in any case likely never entice me completely away from the real thing.
You clearly don't travel a lot, especially internationally.
EBook readers are frigging great. I have one... while I'm totally unhappy with the quality over all of *EVERY* e-book reader out there, the benefit outweighs the problems, if only marginally. The fact is, I have a very limited amount of space to carry my things. On 8 - 14 hour flights, I can easily go through a 700 page book if not two. There is no way I can carry around 4 700 page books, at a minimum, on each flight along with all my other gear. MY EBook reader has 120 books on it and it fits in my photo gear bag, which is a mandatory carry on for me. My photobag might... MIGHT fight 1 700 page book when it's fully loaded. If I'm halfway through that book and board a 14 hour flight, I'd be screwed. With the ebook reader, I know I have a bucket load of additional reading material to keep me from getting arrested by the air marshals for beating up idiotic passengers.
My iLiad cost around £200 (I didn't pay full price). £2 per public domain book is what I pay for books (including ones in the public domain) from a local charity shop. The space issues are for papers, not for books: I have lots of book shelves, but my desk was piled high with research papers that I'd printed. Most of the materials I've read on it could have been read on other devices, but I've read vastly more on it than on my Nokia 770 and I can't read things in the park during the summer on any other device I own (which is when I got the most use from my iLiad so far). 'I wanted one' was the reason that I got it, but over its lifetime I've got reasonable value from it. One thing that I didn't mention was travelling. I can take a few dozen books to read on the train or plane or in hotels when I'm travelling. They would take up most of my hand luggage if I took paper copies (not to mention weighing vastly more).
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