Adobe® Acrobat® 8 PDF Bible

Chapter 30. PDFs and eBooks

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Creating eBooks

• Acquiring eBooks

• Reading eBooks

The promise of eBooks has been a roller coaster ride for users, providers, and would-be authors in recent years. The fall of some important content providers, coupled with some not-so-impressive display mechanisms, has slowed down an industry that many thought had a lot of promise. Notwithstanding hardware-display mechanisms and user acceptability, the software used to secure eBooks and make them accessible to every potential consumer was not as robust as viewing documents in Acrobat viewers.

With the introduction of Acrobat 6, Adobe Systems waved good-bye to the Adobe eBook Reader software and offered users, content providers, and content authors a much more attractive means of creation, protection, and delivery of eBooks. In Acrobat 7, the eBook branding was changed to Digital Editions, but the development and delivery for eBooks remained the same in Acrobat 7 as was introduced in Acrobat 6.

Now in Acrobat 8, Adobe has changed the user interface for acquiring and managing Adobe Digital Editions (notice the rebranding of Digital Editions now referred to as Adobe Digital Editions). You'll find the new interface to be attractive and intuitive. Adobe Digital Editions are easy to read in the new interface and acquiring new books has been made much easier.

The responsibility for restricting eBook viewing and file exchanging is all within the hands of the content provider using special software to guard ...