Digital Editions: Working Again, Still Not Impressed

Just as a follow-​up to my last post about the new Adobe Digital Editions eBooks reader soft­ware, Adobe has released and updated ver­sion a cou­ple days ago that solved the crash­ing prob­lem that I and many other users were hav­ing. So now, I can now go back to read­ing my Flash book.

I’m happy I can go back to study­ing the new ver­sion of Flash, but I still think this new soft­ware is sub par for Adobe and I’m still won­der­ing why they though they “had” to cre­ate yet another reader for eBooks instead of let­ting cus­tomers use the far more sophis­ti­cated and bet­ter work­ing Acrobat Reader 8.1. I mean, if Digital Editions actu­ally improved the user expe­ri­ence I may under­stand why it was cre­ated, but it doesn’t. Quite the opposite.

Admittedly, I have an old com­puter by today’s stan­dards (a sit­u­a­tion soon to be cor­rected as I’m shop­ping for a new one this week) but Reader 8.1 works very well on this machine. It’s still respon­sive and feels quite fast. In con­trast, when I try to nav­i­gate a doc­u­ment in Digital Editions, click­ing but­tons often has no effect what­so­ever and press­ing the key­board arrow keys to advance to the next page either does noth­ing or advances to a seem­ingly ran­dom spot. In Reader, a press of the right arrow key brings me to the top of the next page no mat­ter what posi­tion I am scrolled to in the pre­ced­ing page, but not in Digital Editions which seems to have no sense of where the pages start and stop in the actual document.

This kind of thing may seem triv­ial to many but it is huge to me as, these days, I prob­a­bly read 5 times more elec­tronic doc­u­ments (in the widest pos­si­ble def­i­n­i­tion of the term) than paper ones. That means I spend a lot of time in Adobe Reader and I’m used to how it works. That doesn’t mean I am unwill­ing or unable to adapt to new ways of doing things, but I usu­ally expect the new to improve on the old. In the case of Digital Editions, IMO, it doesn’t and it makes it all that more frus­trat­ing to be forced to use it to read the elec­tronic books I have or may pur­chase in the future.