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In this episode: Adobe Digital Editions, wherein our intrepid hero, (me), tries to read an eBook with Adobe Digital Editions. I swear, I think Adobe is secretly trying to kill eBooks, because they make installing this software so hard that you stop caring about ever using it, and just go to a bookstore, or order it off Amazon.com
In this case, I needed an update. Can I just install the update? No, I have to first manually remove the old version.
Sigh.
By the way, there's no real download link. It's a fucking Flash application, because evidently, everything at Adobe must use Flash wherever possible. I imagine at some point, everything Adobe makes will be Flash on PDF, and you'll boot into an Adobe OS to use it.
Yet the Mac community continually gives Adobe an unending bye, in spite of the fact that by and large, Adobe treats its Mac users far worse than even Microsoft does. The Mac community has been Stockholmed into thinking that Adobe has some special love for Mac users, and therefore, Mac users shouldn't criticize them too much.
Bullshit.
The Emperor has no fucking clothes, and the leadership at Adobe has been sucking Big Enterprise Cock since Bruce Chizen took it over, and if you think his replacement is going to remake that company into something that cares about you unless you have 50K computers, get lucid. Adobe wants to be a bigger player in the Enterprise than Microsoft, and they want to create their own platform, regardless of which OS you prefer. They're just smart enough not to to have a dingaling like Ballmer sticking his foot in his mouth once a week as their leader. But if you seriously think that outside of a few product teams, that Adobe wants Mac users to do anything but give them money and then STFU? You're delusional.
I'd love for Adobe to get some serious competition. Especially for Acrobat. Watching that team get their asses beat down by two people in a garage would fucking rule.
Technorati Tags:
Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy, Incompetence, Installers MATTER
Posted by John C. Welch at 18:17 | Permalink
Comments
Yeah, I tried Digital Editions. When I found out what an excruciating experience its Flash-based Reader was, I tried to read the e-book with Adobe Reader. Guess what? If Digital Editions existed on your computer when you downloaded the e-book, Reader won't open it. So I purged Digital Editions from my system and use Reader exclusively to read PDFs. It's a bloated monstrosity, but at least it works. (I would use Preview, but there are some scanned PDFs that show nothing but blank pages in Preview.)
Most of my e-books, though, are from Project Gutenberg, Manybooks.net, Google Books, or Internet Archive, so Digital Editions don't enter into the matter. Of course I prefer transcribed books that I can read in PDF, or if there are illustrations or links to footnotes and whatnot, in HTML, but transcribing books takes work, so I guess the wave of the future is (badly) scanned texts like Google Books and the Internet Archive offer. At least the Internet Archive allows you to download texts in the infinitely superior DjVu format:
http://www.lizardtech.com/download/dl_download.php?detail=doc_djvu_plugin&platform=macx
Pardon the proselytizing, but I would really like for DjVu to take over from PDF, although admittedly, for pure text e-books it's a wash. But for scanned texts, its superiority is enormous: about 1/3 the size of a color PDF and a little smaller than a B&W PDF for a full-color file. Plus, the app itself takes up 1/12 of the disk space of Adobe Reader; and most of THAT is the browser plug-in (which I never use.)
The real reasons I want them to kick Adobe's ass, though, are:
A: Adobe is the new Microsoft, and
2: Lizardtech is based right here in Seattle, and it would be poetic justice after Adobe bought out and killed off Aldus all those years ago.
Posted by:
Gatesbasher 
|
May 18, 2008 7:09 PM
I totally agree. I sometimes wonder if Adobe would get a pass from the Mac community for making packaging from baby skins.
Posted by:
sdf |
May 19, 2008 12:11 AM
Wouldn't it be nice if apple used part of their cash mountain to buy adobe out?
Sigh...
Posted by:
Tom Hillman |
May 19, 2008 6:42 AM
The problem with your assessment of Adobe being Enterprised focused is that doing managed deployment of Adobe apps for Windows sucks balls too.
Posted by:
Sketch |
May 19, 2008 9:46 AM
Sketch, you assume that I mean Adobe loves windows. They don't, they hate all their users equally. They love the enterprise NUMBERS. Like I said, within 2-3 ierations, I fully expect Adobe to say "Fuck the OS, we're running on top of embedded linux in our own partition, and if you want other applications, you can just fucking reboot."
Posted by:
bynkii |
May 19, 2008 10:39 AM
Tom,
No, that wouldn't fix the problem, and it would fuck over windows users in the long run I think. What they need is someone running that company who doesn't give a fuck about the installer team egos or the Flex team egos or the Acrobat team egos and says "We are going to treat ALL our customers well, regardless of platform or size, and we're going to stop sucking Enterprise cock."
Posted by:
bynkii |
May 19, 2008 10:41 AM
