Digital Editions

Digital Editions 1.5 now released
(May 14, 2008)
Adobe has updated its popular Digital Editions software, a lightweight, rich Internet application for reading, acquiring and organizing digital books and other publications. Version 1.5 features enhanced DRM flexibility through named activation so that users can move content across platforms and mobile devices using an Adobe ID. In addition, ADE 1.5 is localized in French and German and has support for Mac® OSX 10.5 (Leopard). Adobe Digital Editions supports both PDF and IDPF EPUB, a standard format designed to reflow for the screens of mobile reading devices, which has gained broad acceptance among book publishers.

Adobe Digital Editions has over 1 million installations since the June 2007 launch. The new software will be automatically provided to users who have installed Digital Editions 1.0, and is available at the product site .

Adobe has also released an updated Digital Editions installer and launcher for distributors of eBooks. The installer is used to detect and install the latest version of ADE for retail or library customers of Adobe eBooks. The software is free to use and available with implementation instructions .

Posted by Ric Wright at 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

While the Best Practices document (over in the Adobe Developer Connection) had the recommendation that books be broken up into chapters, it wasn't clear when you needed to break a document up further, or when a book was small enough so that one XHTML file was sufficient.

With the recent update to the document (version 1.0.2) we've given you information on how big the chapters can be.

Those limits on the file sizes are as follows:
* XHTML/DTBook chapters: 300k uncompressed per chapter/100k compressed.
* Images: 10M uncompressed.

Note that these limits are for a single chapter document (or image) within the package, not a limitation on the size of the ePub document. The ePub can of course be much larger (limited by available storage space.)
The limits are important for reading ePub documents on a mobile device.

Posted by Paul Norton at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)