Adobe release Digital Editions 1.5 - with enhanced DRM flexibility
Adobe Digital Editions has been updated with enhanced DRM support and flexibility, now at version 1.5. Adobe DE is a Flash based, lightweight, internet application used for reading PDF’s and the IDPF’s ePub document formats.
The enhancements to their DRM means that users activate their DRM protection on a named basis, this allows you to move your protected eBooks/eDocuments across platforms and mobile devices, of course we’d rather not have any DRM (or at least just social DRM). There is also a limit of 6 desktop and 6 handheld devices that you can activate, which should be okay for most people in the short term (if TeleRead’s DRM Poll is anything to go by) but over a period of several years we are likely to need to activate more devices than this, particlarly if we have to re-format our OS. We shall have to see what the future holds for those needing to activate more devices.
DE 1.5 will also run on a Mac OSX Leopard (10.5) and has been localised to English, French and German.
It was reported that there were one of two glitches for some people when updating their current version of Adobe DE, with a fix here. According to the Adobe Forum though, this has now been resolved.
There is however one rather large flaw with DE 1.5 in that there is still no support for text justification. Peter Sorotokin, one of the DE developers, commented about this on MobileRead. He stated the reason is that “we need to pull new low-level line layout code which would support bidi, glyph composition, etc. and we are hesitant to add features to the current branch” - perhaps we will see this feature in version 2.0.
If you wish to try out the new Adobe DE 1.5 then you can grab it here; http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/
