“By creating a specialized, consumer-friendly application like Digital Editions, Adobe is ensuring publishers can securely deliver high-impact content to the widest possible audience, across hardware platforms, operating systems and devices,” said Shantanu Narayen (pictured), president and COO at Adobe, as he today introduced at the MAX 2006 Conference & Expo in Las Vegas the public beta of Adobe's new Rich Internet Application (RIA) built from the ground up for digital publishing.

Digital Editions, explained Narayen, delivers a straightforward user experience for reading and managing commercially-published digital publications:

"It builds on the Adobe eBook capabilities that were integrated into previous versions of Adobe Reader and takes them further by adding the ability to incorporate Flash interactivity and rich media, enabling publishers to create next-generation digital publications that surpass digital forms of paper books."

With native PDF support as well as an XHTML-based reflow-centric publication format, Adobe characterizes Digital Editions as "an engaging way to acquire, read, and manage content, including eBooks, digital magazines, digital newspapers and other digital publications."

Initially available as a free public beta for Windows, Digital Editions will support Macintosh systems as a universal binary application, Linux platforms, as well as mobile phones and other embedded devices in future versions.

The Digital Editions beta includes integration with Adobe Acrobat 8 and Reader 8, which can install and launch Digital Editions from within their user interface.

The Digital Editions download is less than 3MB including Adobe Flash Player 9 and typically takes less than two minutes to install over a broadband connection. With an RIA service model, Adobe notes that users will have access to the latest version of Digital Editions, so they can take advantage of new features and security enhancements.

Adobe Digital Editions beta wasunveiled at Adobe MAX 2006 today in Las Vegas, and will be available for free download from the Adobe Labs Web site at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/digitaleditions. Version 1.0 is expected to be available in early 2007.