Can we put these new eBooks on our PDAs?

Following the link you provide just gets you back to the ADE home page where you find nothing about "Announcements." You do, however, by reading the beginning get told that you can transfer books between PC's and devices. If not a mobile device (PDA or Smartphone), what is it referring to? And when are you supposedly coming up with it: 2 months, 6 months, 1 year? Have they been so busy writing software to run on iPhone that there's been no further movement with this. Yes, we can all simply use Reader 6 authorizing DRM, but I can't even get the right software anymore to work Windows Mobile 6, so I can only work this with a Palm OS. What's happening? You have the market by the s....hairs, but leave everyone hanging by rolling only part of the software out! There's too many of us out there that routinely work between PC's and handhelds to be left hanging like this!

Hi Clark and Scott, It's Stephen Cole here, CEO of eBooks.com.

I certainly understand your disappointment. Please contact our support team by logging in at www.ebooks.com and going here http://help.ebooks.com/hd/new_ticket.php

At the very least they'll be able to swap your books to MobiPocket format (assuming the publishers released your books in that format), which should work on your devices.

Hope this helps.

Stephen

Scott, you're absolutely right. I got into this same trouble with ebooks.com. But worse, neither they nor Adobe tell you that when you upgrade to Reader 8 - that it will delete Reader 7 from your computer and you won't even be able to use it anymore! I upgraded to 8 but did it as a fresh install into a separate directory from 7. But when I tried to open 7 it just kept opening 8. version 7 was rendered useless on my computer. No one said anything about that happening.

Adobe really just takes over your computer with no respect for the user. They don't even tell you during the install that it's going to destroy all previous versions of Reader. It's incredibly maddening.

So like you I bought a few ebooks in this new format only to discover it made all my old ebooks useless! And how dare ebook.com charge us full price - even more than Amazon.com charges for a real book! At least the real book will last the rest of your life. These may not even last a few months yet they dare to charge you full price for them! I'm not going to use them anymore. No more ebooks for me until some format becomes standardized. This is so outrageous.

So yes, if I do what Bentley suggested, then my handful of new ebooks I just purchased will stop working. So how in the hell is anyone supposed to be able to use books from both versions?

AND WHAT KIND OF COMPANY DIDN'T TAKE THAT INTO CONSIDERATION WHEN THEY DEVELOPED THEIR NEW SOFTWARE. This is really a black eye for ADOBE if you ask me.

Yes, but what happens to Digital Editions of ebooks I misguidely paid for and downloaded thinking DE worked just as Adobe EReader used to with my PDA? E-Books.com which touts your reader aren't telling anyone what happens next. Are the downloads they carry just useless without DE? Any way to convert them backward with Adobe's help?

This is really poor launching of a whole new platform. Commercial sites who use your format aren't making clear in any way, the consequences of choosing the Adobe version of a file format; all they do is link you to Adobe DE and you're left to discover the problem.

And by the way, your website information in the opening paragraphs of the latest Adobe Reader for Palm OS states, that now you can "take your Digital Editions... with you...." You guys need to get your marketing in sync.

Digital Editions will have some device support in future versions. However, at this point we do not. When we have news we will make announcements on http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions.

If this is important to you, it is possible to uninstall ADE 1.5 and reinstall an older version of Acrobat to use the old ebook reader plugin features in Acrobat 6 or 7. There are instructions on this somewhere on the forum that you should be able to find in a search.

Regards,

Bentley Wolfe
Senior Support Engineer, Flash/Flash Player/Digital Editions
Adobe