The new Adobe Digital Editions is an new software that lets people to read and manage e-books wit open standards. Open standards are publicly available specifications that provide a common method of achieving a particular goal. Adobe clearly understood the cost involved in distribution of e-books in all different formats to various devices, and worked close with the publishers, authors and service providers on new format (PDF, XHTML, OEB, OCF) that may become universal. This led to this beta version of the software. One can download free e-books from Adobe Labs's website to check it out on Digital Editions.
The software is less than 10 megabytes and it takes only couple of minutes to install. It never expires and automatically updates. The main advantage I notice is the time taken to open and scroll through the books. It is absolutely fast. There are multiple views that users can click to read their books - more comfortable. It opens to the page where user stopped reading on the previous attempt. Google is using JPEG-2000 and JBIG2 image compression for their PDFs, currently Digital Editions beta doesn't support Google's PDFs. They will be supported in the final release. Issues such as more keyboard shortcuts, icon view - slow when there are more than 100 books, crash on windows OS sometimes proper search spots in XHTML based documents is expected to be solved in the next beta release. Moreover, Adobe made a discussion in the Labs Forum so that users can leave their comment about the software usability.
Adobe is making a big move while no one is looking. In relation to the new Digital Editions beta, Adobe says "Make reading an experience".
References:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/digitaleditions/
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/digitaleditions/faq.html#item-1-3