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You can install Adobe® Digital Editions on your system a number of different ways. The simplest is to visit the installer page. From there you can simply install Adobe Digital Editions. Alternatively, you may be prompted to install Adobe Digital Editions when buying or borrowing an item from the library. In this case, the installation is part of the download process.
In both cases, you are first prompted to confirm that you know you are installing a "full privileges" application. Adobe Digital Editions is not only a web application, but it is also a full-featured application that writes a few small files to your hard drive. Then you are prompted to approve the actual installation. After the quick download, Adobe Digital Editions is launched and you are prompted to accept the End-User License Agreement (EULA). After you accept the EULA, Adobe Digital Editions is launched and begins initializing.
The initialization is simple in most cases, but if you have previously bought items (books, magazines, or other types of documents) with Adobe Acrobat® or Reader® software, then those items need to be migrated to Adobe Digital Editions. This is usually a relatively quick process. Adobe Digital Editions opens each item and reverifies its license to the user. This requires access to the Internet, so you must be online during this phase of initialization. If you don't have any items that are protected by digital rights management, then you don't need to be online during the initialization. If you have a large number of items (for example, more than 100), then this process may take a while, but you will see a progress bar indicating the state of the migration as it proceeds. Adobe Digital Editions then does some housekeeping (setting up the manifest and application shortcuts) and launches.
Note: In your Digital Editions folder, you will see a file named manifest.xml as well as a folder called Annotations. Manifest.xml is where housekeeping information is kept. Be very careful not to delete or damage these files as they contain all the information about your items and annotations. In early versions of Adobe Digital Editions, it is was okay to delete the manifest. With version 1.0, the application will still rebuild a damaged or deleted manifest, but you may lose significant amounts of information, such as annotation and bookmark info.
Once the application launches, you will see either the Library or the Reading pane. The Library pane provides a way to view and organize your collection of items. The Reading pane allows you to read, navigate, print, annotate, and search your documents. Adobe Digital Editions always remembers where you were the last time you viewed a particular item and also what you were doing the last time you exited the program. The first time you enter the application, it goes automatically to the Reading pane if you are downloading an item, but if you are just starting it on its own, it takes you to the Library pane.
Both panes contain three areas: the toolbar at the top, the main work area, and a collapsible pane on the left. The left pane can be closed by dragging or by double-clicking the small gray bar on the divider bar with the small gray triangle. You can reopen the left pane by double-clicking the divider bar again or by simply grabbing the bar and dragging it open.
The library's main area is occupied by the items in your currently selected bookshelf. The left pane always contains the bookshelves themselves. The Reading pane includes a main document area, a toolbar at the top, and a Tab pane on the left. The Tab pane can show the Table of Contents (if the item has one) or the bookmarks and annotations (if there are any). You can toggle the left pane between these two by clicking the icons at the top of the left pane, just below the toolbar.
To move back and forth between the Reading and Library panes, click the library or reading icons in the upper left of the toolbar (or use the appropriate shortcut key).
In the Library pane, you can add items to your library. There are several ways to add items:
When you add items, they are added to your general library. You can subsequently arrange them as you like (see "All about bookshelves"). There is no limit to the number or type of items you can have in your library.
You can get all the information about an item by selecting it and choosing Item Info from the context menu for that item (look for the small triangle). Item Info includes more metadata about the item, the permissions (number of copies or pages to print and so on), as well as the actual location of the item on your computer.
Note: If you add items from your computer by double-clicking them or by downloading them directly from the Internet (not via an eCommerce site or a library), the items will not be added to your library. You will be able to view them, but they will not be a part of your permanent library. Only items added by one of the three methods above will be added to your permanent library.
Buying items online consists of two parts: the eCommerce part in which you pay for the item and the subsequent downloading of the item to your computer. Once you have paid for your item or items and asked to have them downloaded, Adobe Digital Editions and the eBook site's server have a conversation during which the eBook server sends Adobe Digital Editions the item's content. You see a dialog box that says "Downloading" for a (usually) brief period. Then a second dialog box stating "Contacting Server" appears, during which time Adobe Digital Editions receives the ability to read the item that was just downloaded. Then your item opens.
You can borrow items from many public libraries for use with Adobe Digital Editions. The download process is very similar to buying items online except you don't have to pay for them. Once the item is in your library, you see a "banner' indicating how much time is left before the item expires. Once the item expires, it remains in your library, but you can't read it. You need to delete it in order to remove it from your library. You can also return items early if you have finished reading them. This is sometime desirable, as libraries limit the number of items that can be borrowed at one time. Simply click the Item Info menu and select Early Return.
Once the items are in your library, there are two ways to view the content of any bookshelf. You can view thumbnails of your items. The thumbnail is the cover page of the item (or just the first page if it doesn't have a cover page). In this view, you see the set of thumbnails and some information about each item (author, title). You can also sort the order in which the items are shown by author, title, date created, number of pages, and so forth.
If you want to see more items at once or sort them more easily, switch to List Item mode. This mode shows a tabular view of the items in a given bookshelf. You can sort the list by clicking any of the column headers (such as Author or Number of Pages).
Bookshelves provide views of your library. Different bookshelves show you different views or selections from the complete collection of items in your library. The application has two kinds of bookshelves: smart and user defined. There are four smart bookshelves, which are defined by the application:
You cannot affect or change the contents or conditions of smart bookshelves (except by adding items to or removing them from your library).
User-defined bookshelves are ones that you create and control. Creating them is easy. Simply click the "+"button at the bottom of the left pane, or choose Add Bookshelf from the Options menu, also at the bottom of the left pane. You can name a bookshelf any way you want, but it should probably be meaningful and not too long. To populate your bookshelf, you can drag items from any other bookshelf (including other user-defined bookshelves) and drop them on your new bookshelf. Note that this doesn't move them from one bookshelf to the other; it only copies them to the new bookshelf. There is no limit to the number of items in a user-defined bookshelf. To remove items from your bookshelf, select the item (it is highlighted with a light gray background) and press Delete. Alternatively, you can use the item's menu, which is accessible when the item is selected, via the small gray triangle in the upper left corner of the selected item.
Note: Some online bookstores sell items without digital rights management protection. This is rare, but it may become more common over time. At present, such items do not appear in the Purchased bookshelf.
There is a huge difference between removing an item from a bookshelf and deleting it. Deleting the item, whether you are in user-defined bookshelf or one of the smart bookshelves, deletes the item completely from your library. This action cannot be undone, so make sure that you want the item deleted and not simply removed. You will be prompted to confirm that you intend to remove the item from your library.
When you open an item that is a PDF document in the Reading pane, you see a toolbar with several elements:
There are four modes of page display in which you can navigate:
You can also navigate within the document using the Table of Contents, if the document has one.
epub documents are composed of reflowable content (such as that on the web), unlike PDF documents, which are fixed in format. Because they don't have fixed pages, the toolbar in Reading mode for an epub document doesn't have the Go To page control that is present in a PDF document. It does have the printer and annotations icons, but instead of different view modes, it has two "a" icons, which are used to change the size of the font used to display the item.
You can navigate epub documents using the normal page controls (menu, scroll bar, shortcut keys). epub documents don't support smooth scrolling. You can also navigate within the document using the Table of Contents (if the document has one).
Finding text in a document (PDF or epub) is easy. Just click the find control on the toolbar, type the word or phrase you want to find, and press Enter. The application will find the first (or next) instance of the word in the current document, go to that page, and highlight the word or phrase. You can then hunt for the same word again by clicking the small right-pointing arrow to the right of the find control. To hunt backwards, click the left-pointing arrow. If the application reaches the end of the document without finding the word or phrase, it will display a small red bar telling you that it has reached the end of the document.
You can add bookmarks and annotations to either PDF or epub documents. To create a bookmark or annotation, simply select some text and click the bookmark icon on the toolbar or choose Create Bookmark from the Options menu by clicking the button in the lower right of the left pane. This brings up a small dialog box that contains text you selected at the top and a text entry area in the middle. You can type as much text as you want in this space or none. If you enter text, you create an annotation link, which appears in the left pane, with the selected text as the first line and the text you typed as the second line. On the left side of the annotation link is a small button-like rectangle, which turns yellow when you mouse over it. If you don't type any text when the annotation dialog box comes up, you create a bookmark. The bookmark link appears in the left pane, but it contains only the line with the text you selected. And the small rectangle is pink when you mouse over it. Finally, the text that was highlighted for an annotation is highlighted in yellow (like the small rectangle), and the text highlighted for a bookmark is highlighted in pink. The annotations and bookmarks you create are saved with your item and will be opened along with it the next time you open that item.
Once you have created bookmarks and annotations, you can use them to navigate around in your item by clicking them. If you wish to edit an annotation or a bookmark, double-click it and the dialog box will open again, at which time you can make any changes you want. You can even change a bookmark to an annotation by adding text, or remove text from an annotation to make it a bookmark.
To delete a bookmark or an annotation, select the bookmark or annotation link it in the Bookmarks pane and press Delete, select Delete Bookmark from the Options menu, or use the appropriate shortcut key.
Note: The bookmarks you add are Adobe Digital Editions bookmarks; they are not PDF bookmarks (which in Acrobat or Reader are added to your "bookmarks," which in Adobe Digital Editions are represented as the Table of Contents). The annotations are also specific to Adobe Digital Editions, wholly different from the notes and other ways that a PDF document can be annotated in Acrobat or Reader.
Adobe Digital Editions supports printing (unless disallowed by the document itself). However, the 1.0 version does not support vector printing — instead it prints out the pages as bitmaps, so the quality is not as sharp as if it were vectors. Also, for documents that contain SWF movie clips, only the initial frame of the movie prints, and it does not reflect any interactive changes you made in the movie clip inside Adobe Digital Editions.
When problems are encountered, the application does its best to tell you what the source of the problem might be so you can resolve the problem. There are three general categories of problems: downloading, document corruption, and incorrectly formatted documents.
When you download an item from the web, you may encounter problems in which the server is unresponsive or the application cannot get the proper authentication. Adobe Digital Editions normally displays a dialog box telling you something about the problem. The most common message is "I/O Error," which means that the application simply could not connect to the server from which it was supposed to get the item or its authentication information. This is most commonly a transient problem that is most easily resolved by simply trying again.
You may also run into situations in which the item you added to the library has been corrupted or deliberately or inadvertently deleted. In this case, the application displays a dialog box telling you the item is missing or corrupt. The book then appears in your library but has a "banner" (a strip of ribbon in the upper left corner of the item) that says "Missing." You can either try to restore the item to the place it used to reside or delete it and try to add a good copy of the item to your library.
The final category is a situation in which the document has some minor errors or warnings. These may arise, for example, because a PDF file uses features not supported by Adobe Digital Editions (for example, JPEG2000 compression) or an epub document uses markup that is not recommended. In most cases, these minor warnings and errors do not produce any visible problems, but the document may not be rendered exactly as the author intended.
| Application-wide keyboard shortcuts | ||
|---|---|---|
| Win keys | Mac keys | Action description |
| Shift+F8 | Cmd+F8 | Moves keyboard focus to toolbar |
| Ctrl+F2 | Cmd+F2 | Moves keyboard focus to main menu on toolbar |
| F5 | F5 | Moves keyboard focus to main work area |
| F6 | F6 | Shifts keyboard focus between toolbar and side and main panels |
| Ctrl+Shift+F5 | Cmd+Shift+F5 | Moves keyboard focus to side panel |
| Ctrl+Shift+T | Cmd+Shift+T | Enables error logging |
| F4 | F4 | Shows or hides side panel |
| Ctrl+L | Cmd+L | Switches to Library pane |
| Ctrl+R | Cmd+R | Switches to Reading pane |
| Ctrl+C | Cmd+C | Copies selected text to clipboard |
| Ctrl+V | Cmd+V | Pastes contents of clipboard |
| DEL | DEL | Deletes currently selected item |
| F1 | F1 | Opens Adobe Digital Editions Help web page in default web browser |
| Alt+F4 | Cmd+Q | Quits Adobe Digital Editions |
| Library view keyboard shortcuts | ||
|---|---|---|
| Win keys | Mac keys | Action description |
| Ctrl+A | Cmd+A | Selects all items in current bookshelf |
| Ctrl+Shift+A | Cmd+Shift+A | Deselects all items |
| Ctrl+O | Cmd+O | Opens Add Item dialog box |
| Space bar, Enter | Space bar, Enter | Opens selected item in Reading pane |
| Ctrl+Left Arrow | Cmd+Left Arrow | Changes current view between thumbnail and list views |
| Ctrl+Right Arrow | Cmd+Right Arrow | Changes current view between list and thumbnail views |
| Ctrl+N | Cmd+N | Opens New Bookshelf dialog box |
| Ctrl+I | Cmd+I | Opens More Info dialog box |
| Reading view keyboard shortcuts | ||
|---|---|---|
| Win keys | Mac keys | Action description |
|
|
Goes to previous screen (in Fit to Width or Custom Fit views) Goes to previous page (in Fit Single Page or Fit Double Page views) |
|
|
Goes to next screen (in Fit to Width or Custom Fit views) Goes to next page (in Fit Single Page or Fit Double Page views) |
|
|
Goes to first page of document |
|
|
Goes to last page of document |
| Ctrl+Left Arrow | Cmd+Left Arrow | Cycles through reading views in the following order: Custom Fit, Fit to Width, Fit Single Page, Fit Double Page |
| Ctrl+Right Arrow | Cmd+Right Arrow | Cycles through reading views in the following order: Fit Double Page, Fit Single Page, Fit to Width, Custom Fit |
| Up Arrow | Up Arrow | Scrolls up a line (in Fit to Width or Custom Fit views) Scrolls up a page (in Fit Single Page or Fit Double Page views) |
| Down Arrow | Down Arrow | Scrolls down a line (in Fit to Width or Custom Fit views) Scrolls down a page (in Fit Single Page or Fit Double Page views) |
| Ctrl+= | Cmd+= | Zooms in (for PDF documents in Custom Fit view) Increases font size (for epub documents) |
| Ctrl+- | Cmd+- | Zooms out (for PDF document in Custom Fit view) Decreases font size (for epub documents) |
| Ctrl+I | Cmd+I | Opens More Info dialog box |
| Ctrl+F | Cmd+F | Moves keyboard focus to find control in toolbar |
| Ctrl+G | Cmd+G | Finds next instance of text in find control |
| Shift+Ctrl+G | Shift+Cmd+G | Finds previous instance of text in find control |
| Ctrl+P | Cmd+P | Prints current item |
| Ctrl+B | Cmd+B | Adds a bookmark at top of current view |
Copyright © 2008 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved.
Use of this website signifies your agreement to the Terms of Use and Online Privacy Policy (updated 03-30-2007).
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