‘Thank you, Adobe Reader 9′: As slim as an overfed elephant and as simple as a Rube Goldberg machine?
Adobe just might be the Rube Goldberg Central of e-bookdom—and I don’t just mean the DRM. Put on your Sarcasm Detector and enjoy the Microblog’s writeup:
"On my cable connection, it took about 5 minutes to download, nicely allowing me enough time to brew a decent cup of coffee while I waited.
"But it wasn’t just a simple, ordinary download. First Adobe told me to download a Firefox plugin. I assumed the plugin would help me read PDFs in my browser. But oh no, this was a special plugin, an Adobe Reader Download Manager (TM) — a plugin specially designed to help Firefox download Adobe’s powerful PDF viewer."
And then people wonder why e-books aren’t catching on? That said, here’s a friendly invitation for Adobe booster to reply. Why is Reader 9 this way?
July 6th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
And yet you dont see a PC/laptop who dont have adobe reader installed.
This is again the issue, people want to read PDF’s and adobe reader does it well, it have coherent and easy to grasp navigation that dont make a mess of itself if you try and zoom in the way most dedicated ebook software does, and once installed it dont really annoys you when your going about your daily surfing/reading.
what it dont do strangely enogh is read anything the biz would label as ebooks not even adobe digital edition based ebooks.
People are actully reading PDF’s probably at a scale where it’s only rivalled by word(who now supports DRM) or firefox as a etext reader but theres as good as no and mass market books for any of those programs.
The reason for adobe readers size have to do with the word processor and colloboration suite they embed in it and the fact that half the acrobat suite is compiled into the reader because it saves them some double work.
July 6th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Delighted to see some pro-PDA thoughts to balance out mine in the opposite direction. Thanks, Daniel.
My reply is that, yes, PDF is popular in part because convenient ways exist to convert from Word files and other formats. But PDF can be HARDER for readers to enjoy. Page breaks do not always come in the right places, and on smaller machines you have the left-to-right scrolling issue. And then there’s the bloat issue.
Yes, PDF e-book abound, but those from large publishers tend to come with Adobe’s proprietary DRM, making the format in effect far from a universal standard for people wanting to enjoy best-sellers.
Finally I’d note that even people like Adobe’s Bill McCoy would acknowledge the superiority of the ePub standard for most e-books because of its reflowability. ePub will work fine even on small-screened machines. No scrolling needed!
Just my hardly infallible opinion.
Thanks, and keep speaking up!
David
July 6th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Anyone who just wants a small fast-loading PDF display program should download the free Foxit reader (2.6Mb). I have Adobe Reader installed because sometimes I have to write scripts that manipulate text from PDF files into other formats, and Adobe Reader does sensible things like maintaining the flow between columns when text is cut and pasted. But for plain old reading it’s massively overblown.
July 7th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
It’s probably just bad craftmanship on the part of implementing xml based formats on PC’s that make it more troublesome to navigate then PDF’s but PDF’s do have a inheritededge of familarity.
I think the general issue is that the Ebook industry mainly develops for the small screen ebook readers while adobe reader are designed for reading non drm coporate manuals on LCD screens at 14″ and bigger. And that leaves they huge market in laptop based ereading market for commersially published book-lengt works, as a complete wasteland.
The fact that adobe reader dont actually read drm’et PDF based ebooks just symbolise this detatchment of the two wery similar things seen from the end user point of view.
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:31 am
Jon, FoxIt, I have to admit, is the fastest closed source PDF reader I’ve ever seen.
But for the fastest reader I use is Sumatra PDF. A small (1.19 Mb installer, 19 mb ram useage, if that) and is snappy. Yes it doesn’t embed into a webpage. Yes it doesn’t open EVERY file (coughDRMcough) and not able to run on Linux/Mac (my major complaint with it) but I personally find it faster then even FoxIt.