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.