Adobe Engage – Ric Wright – Adobe Digital Editions

Digital Editions is another Adobe Labs product.

They took the Flash 9 player and linked in some reading technologies to create a very lightweight eBook reader. After visiting the library, Ric installed the reader and started to read a book. Typical time to download and start reading a book is less than 20 seconds, due in part to the use of the Adobe Lightweight PDF Reader.

The reader reflows text and even adjusts the number of columns based on the amount of screen real estate. This is far better than reading a PDF onscreen in the usual way, where there’s far too much scrolling and panning. Documents can have embedded Shockwave (SWF) content. Content nests arbitrarily.

Currently in beta with 250,000 downloads to date and 20,000 new registrations per day.

The product was built really quickly and the feature set is minimalistic at present. More goodies are on the way!