Saturday, January 13, 2007

Adobe Digital Editions: free ebook on Flash

Speaking of Flash, there's a free e-copy of a chapter in the Visual Quickpro Guide: Macromedia Flash 8 Advanced for Windows and MacIntosh on Adobe Labs' site: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/digitaleditions/library/

This is interesting because the page uses Adobe Digital Editions - a new way of publishing using a pdf-style drm program. It is still in beta, but now runs on Mac OS X. It somehow hooks into Safari when it installs.

Check it out.

Update: this is one funky program. It only works when connected.... you can't download the content, apparently. It puts a 4kb ebx.etd file on your computer that manages the digital rights. If you click that file, it tells you you've already accessed it and you're out of luck. But if you go back to Adobe Labs page, you can still read the content.

When you right-click on an ebook, you get a settings dialog that can allow Adobe access to your web cam and mic....!!!

And as noted in the comments below, it's not the whole visual qp guide book, just 24 pages.

3 comments:

Murley said...

Actually, it appears to be only chapter 2 of the book. Not the entire book. When you click on the install and read button, you are taken to a screen that is a Terms of Service agreement screen (click "yes" and you agree).

However, the terms are not spelled out on that screen, and there is no link to the TOS (only a URL, which I suppose you're supposed to open in another window after copying and pasting into an address bar).

I suppose most people will just click on the "yes" button and be done with it, but I'd like a little more transparency.

Murley said...

BTW, you can't actually "copy" the URL from the screen - you have to manually type it into another address bar. very bad usability, IMHO.

Chuck Fadely said...

Yep, it's definitely a beta. The last time I looked, though, it didn't support Macs at all.

It's all about drm so you can't do most things you can do on normal web pages.

On the other hand, it's exciting how fast the pages load.

I wish they had a free beta of the authoring program.