New Adobe® Acrobat® Reader with Web Buy to Spur Market for Electronic Distribution and Sale of Electronic Books to Consumers

San Jose, Calif., (November 15, 1999) (Nasdaq:ADBE)--In response to the growing demand for high-quality electronic content, Adobe® Systems Incorporated today announced the immediate availability of the new Acrobat® Reader software with Web Buy. Introduced on August 31st, Web Buy is a feature within Acrobat Reader that enables consumers to purchase and read encrypted Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) electronic content from their desktop and laptop computers. Additionally, Adobe has created a virtual library of more than 20 classics including "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," "A Christmas Carol" and "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland," which can be downloaded at no charge from the Adobe website.

Acrobat Reader with Web Buy, available on both Windows® and Macintosh platforms, makes purchasing and viewing electronic content quick and easy. Consumers simply click on a document they wish to purchase and the request is sent to the publisher’s commerce server. After payment is electronically submitted, consumers receive a "key" for opening and reading the content. Since documents are encoded in PDF, the visual integrity of the original document format—both graphics and fonts—is preserved. Publishers benefit from the technology because encrypted Adobe PDF provides the needed protection against unauthorized access. As a result, consumers will have a greater selection of electronic content to choose from.

"While the Internet offers an excellent channel for purchasing electronic content, authors and publishers have been reticent to put their most popular works on the Web for fear of unauthorized access and distribution," said Joe Eschbach, vice president, ePaper® Solutions Group, Adobe Systems Incorporated. "With the availability of Acrobat Reader software with Web Buy, Adobe is opening that bottleneck, giving consumers a mechanism for purchasing rights to books, news or information. We have been working with a number of partners and customers to provide a comprehensive solution that meets the needs of all parties, from consumers and publishers, to distributors and retailers."

Thoreau on a Laptop
For a limited time, Adobe will make available several classic books for electronic download using the new Acrobat Reader with Web Buy. Users can install the new Reader software and download the classics at oducts/acrobat/webbuy/main.html http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/webbuy/main.html. Among the books available are:
"A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens
"A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift
"Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll
"Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley
"Gulliver’s Travels" by Jonathan Swift
"Hamlet" by William Shakespeare
"Kidnapped" by Robert Louis Stevenson
"Paradise Lost" by John Milton
"Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen
"Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe
"The Errand Boy" by Horatio Alger
"The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allen Poe
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving
"The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson
"Through the Looking Glass" by Lewis Carroll
"Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson
"Walden and Civil Disobedience"by Henry David Thoreau
"Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte

Leading in the Development of Standards
As a leader in the eBooks market, Adobe has been actively involved with a number of initiatives, consortia and standards bodies. In addition to driving the development of Adobe PDF, which is the de facto standard for electronic document distribution, Adobe is a voting member of both the W3C working group for the extensible Markup Language (XML) and the Open eBooks (OEB) working group. Adobe has also been instrumental in the development of the Electronic Book Exchange (EBX) and participates on the W3C working group for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).

Technologies for the Future of Reading
Web Buy is a new feature within the latest version of Acrobat Reader software and provides consumers with a mechanism for purchasing and viewing electronic content via the Internet. It complements Adobe PDF Merchant™, which is a server-based technology designed to be integrated into existing
e-commerce and transaction servers. PDF Merchant was announced in August and is scheduled to be available in Q1, 1999. Together, the technologies give publishers a mechanism for managing the encryption of PDF files and the distribution of keys to access them.

With more than 110 million downloads to date and currently running at a rate of about 100,000 downloads per day, Adobe Acrobat Reader software is among the most popular applications in the world. As a leading technology provider for paper and digital document tools, Adobe is leveraging its expertise to make the Web a thriving electronic commerce channel by providing publishers with a secure document delivery solution and offering consumers a visually rich viewing experience

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Founded in 1982, Adobe Systems builds award-winning software solutions for Web and print publishing. Its graphic design, imaging, dynamic media, and authoring tools enable customers to create, publish and deliver visually-rich content for various types of media. The company’s products are used by Web and graphic designers, professional publishers, document-intensive organizations, business users, and consumers. Adobe is the fourth largest U.S.-based personal software company, with annual revenues approaching $1 billion. It employs over 2,400 employees worldwide and has operations in North America, Europe, the Pacific Rim, Japan and Latin America. Adobe’s worldwide headquarters are in San Jose, California and its web site is located at www.adobe.com.