“Without any fanfare, the Adobe Digital Media Store, which was set up to showcase the versatility of the PDF format, will cease operations on June 3, 2005. According to its Web page, users no longer are able to purchase digital content, although they may download already purchased content and redeem gift certificates before the June closing date.” – PDF Zone
The TeleRead take: Adobe says the store isn’t necessary since other companies are offering e-books in PDF. A different take comes from Joe Wilcox, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research:
“Our surveys show that 46 percent of online consumers are not interested in reading any form of content in a digital format,” Wilcox said.
Wilcox said that adoption of e-books overall perhaps has lagged behind other forms of digital media because the pricing of most of these books is not that different from physical books.
“There aren’t the same production costs involved, [yet] there is usually little or no difference in price between e-books and their physical counterparts. And the physical book format is highly portable. You can lend to someone else, while e-books are constrained by the devices they can be read on. It’s hard to share content [through e-docs] as it is with physical books and magazines,” Wilcox said.
For his part, Wilcox said he is baffled that e-books didn’t pursue a lower-cost strategy to increase their adoption.
Exactly! OpenReader will help by reducing format/DRM costs compared to those of PDF and other proprietary formats. If nothing else, a common format will encourage companies to avoid redundant format-related R&D.
Meanwhile our sympathies to anyone who might be laid off as a result of the closing.
