As I demonstrated in my original post, longer passwords trump complex passwords every time.

Here’s an actual example of this nonsense.  A few weeks ago I was driven crazy again by a web site (which I will not name) which demands a nonsensical approach to password complexity.

Your password has to be at least 6 characters (note this!!).

So I put in a much longer password (15 characters or more), only to have it rejected because it was all lower case!

OK, so I added an uppercase character. Now it was rejected because it didn’t include a digit!!

OK, so I added four numbers. Now it was rejected because it didn’t include any punctuation!!!

Bear in mind that we’re now nearly up to 20 characters all together, and this stupid web site would have been content with only 6, so long as they included upper and lower case, digits, and punctuation.

Listen to me, folks! A 6-digit password is not in the least secure! No matter how many silly kinds of characters you put into it.

A 15 or longer password, even if all in lower or all in uppercase, is far, far, far more secure. And what’s more, you can remember it!

Thinking about this some more, I came to realize that actually, insisting that a password include upper and lower case characters and at least one digit, in fact decreases (not increases) password security.  And what’s more I can prove it.

How so? Because it gives additional information to the hacker, that’s how.

If you have a system which allows but does not mandate upper and lower case letters and digits in passwords, then the number of possible combinations which the hacker has to work through is much, much larger than if that requirement is mandated.

Let’s take a worked example.  We start with the pathetic 6-character long password the above site wanted, to keep the numbers manageable. We’ll also ignore the use of punctuation symbols for the time being.

If upper and lower case and digits are allowed, then there are 26 x 2 (upper + lower case letters) + 10 (numerals) = 62 possible tokens.  For a password length of 6, that means that in each of the six character positions there can be any of the 62 tokens, so the total number of combinations is 62 raised to the power of 6 (62 x 62 x 62 x 62 x 62 x 62) .  Wolfram Alpha tells me that is nearly 57 billion possible combinations.

Now consider sites which mandate (insist upon) the use of at least one uppercase letter, at least one lowercase letter and at least one digit.  Hackers now know for certain that any password the site accepts must be structured like this.  This clearly reduces the number of possible combinations. By how much? Well, if there must be at least one uppercase letter, then one of the character positions only has 26 possible variants, not 62.  Same for the required lowercase letter. Worst of all is the digit – that means the hacker knows that one of the character positions only has 10 possible variants, not 62.  So the number of combinations must be only (26 x 26 x 10 x 62 x 62 x 62).  This is a mere 1.6 billion. Compared with 57 billion for a site which didn’t mandate.

1.6 billion combinations would be a doddle for automated hacking tools to crack by testing each combination in turn.

Hence, the insistence on fancy combinations of characters has made the hacker’s job some 35 times easier (or put another way, means that the hacker can crack the password in less than 3% of the time) than if the web site had not mandated how the password was structured.  How’s that for a perverse result?

All of this is true with longer passwords, but it’s the acceptance of short passwords is the real killer. In my view, the minimum length should be at least 12 characters.

Please, web site managers, come to your senses and insist on long passwords or pass-phrases, and allow them to be all upper or all lowercase or whatever, so that they can be easy for people to remember. A pass-phrase like ‘allmyfriendsaregettingmarried’ is way, way, way more secure than ’3k5&1w’ .

It’s called The Narratorium, and here’s some more information about it:

What is The Narratorium all about?

The Narratorium is primarily aimed at readers.  We want to provide you with an enjoyable place to come and read selected stories, free of charge. We aim to publish at least two or three original items each and every week.  The stories we post here will be curated, selected by ourselves for readability and storytelling value.  You can think of it as a free online fiction magazine with a small group of editors, who are also authors.

The stories you’ll see here will certainly reflect our own specific taste and writing styles, and if you don’t like our taste or style, you’ll have to go elsewhere.  If you do like what we write, however, we hope that you’ll keep coming back.  Follow us on your favorite social network and we’ll keep you informed of every new piece we post.

Please come and visit!

This story has now been moved to my new venture The Narratorium.  Please come and visit us there, we’ll be publishing at least two or three new pieces of fiction or other narrative every week.

Titled Paradise Lost, the story deals with Ellie, who in fleeing the collapse of civilization has found herself facing a terrible choice.

Click here to select your format and download the story.

I’m now publishing short stories and other narratives on a regular basis on my new web site, The Narratorium.  Free to read, no advertisements. Please visit!

This is the first story I wrote for the first day of a Google+ project as part of National Novel Writing Month during November 2011.  I’m not competing in the major event, but this subsidiary event organized by Becky Raymond challenges writers to write a short piece of fiction each day, based on a stimulus photograph or image.  It’s called the  G+ Flash Fiction Project.

Anyway, this is what I wrote based on this image below.  The photo is by Evelyn Lamprey:

This is a work of fiction. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

At the End of His Tether

He’d left a note, of course.  It was quite brief, but at the end he’d asked his neighbor – begged her, really – to look after Sally.  Mrs Donovan loved dogs, had two of her own.  Sally would fit right in.  He didn’t have to worry about that at least.

He’d bought the rope at the hardware store in Hannover Street, twelve feet should be more than enough. The clerk hadn’t asked him any questions. No reason she should, really. He wasn’t a regular there, didn’t do much in the way of home maintenance.

Back home, in his kitchen, he tried to tie a proper hangman’s knot.  He’d looked it up on the Internet, actually.  Amazing what you could find out on the Internet. Except for a reason to go on living, of course.  You could Google that phrase, but all that came back was the predictable religious-oriented hogwash, 200,000 or more hits. Empty, meaningless, like his life.

Except for Sally, that is. She’d kept him going longer than he’d thought possible after Jenny had died.  But there were limits on how much comfort a dog’s companionship could give you.  And now he’d reached that limit.

The knot was tied.  He’d made a bit of a mess of it, really.  It didn’t look much like the drawing he’d found online.  Typical of how he’d botched most things in his life. Still, the loop moved freely enough. It would do.

Sally was in her basket in the corner, looking up at him eagerly.  She probably thought he was going to take her out for a walk.  “Not tonight, sweetheart.”  Never again, actually.  Not that Sally knew that, of course.  Although now she was whining and looking at him, staring deeply at him.  She knew something was wrong.

He should put her outside, but it was cold out there and in a while it would be getting dark.  And she’d have to stay out there all night, maybe longer. Who could tell how long it would be before they found him and Mrs Donovan read the note? But if he left her inside… That could be worse.  What if it took a week? Mrs Donovan might notice after a while that she hadn’t seen him, but surely not straight away.

He hadn’t thought things through, obviously. He’d been too wound up in his own misery, he’d only been able to focus on his one mission, a way to bring it all to an end.

Sally whined again.  In a sudden rush of resolution, he hardened his heart, stood up with the rope, and stepped through the door into the lounge room, closing it behind him firmly before Sally could follow him.  In the lounge room was the angled ceiling which followed the shape of the roof.  At intervals where the cross-beams ran there was space between the cedar beams and the ceiling itself, enough room to fit the rope.  He’d been staring at those gaps for weeks, thinking about it.  This was where he was going to do it.  He stood up on the table and threaded the free end of the rope through.

Sally started to bark, and was leaping up at the door from the kitchen.  She’d never done that before.  He tried to close his mind to the sound, but it didn’t work.

Suddenly, standing there stupidly on the table, the noose dangling from his hand, he found he couldn’t shut out thoughts about what would happen to Sally without him.  Would Mrs Donovan really take her in? She was on a pension, he knew. Feeding an extra dog might be too much.

She’s just a stupid dog, he thought savagely to himself.  What does it matter if she’s taken to the pound, given away to some cruel stranger, or put down? Just a damn dog!  A damn dog! She doesn’t matter.  But then, but then…

The barking was frantic now. She loves you, he thought.  There’s still one creature in the world who you matter to, who values your life. And she does matter. She matters a lot.

He stood there on the table for a long, long time.  After a while he dropped the noose and climbed foolishly down.

He opened the kitchen door.  “Come on, girl,” he said in a husky voice he could hardly identify as his own.  “Let’s go for a walk.”

 by David Grigg.

(C) Copyright David R. Grigg 2011.  All rights reserved.

If you liked this story, please visit this page to find more of my fiction.

I celebrate all of these aspects.  But in the longer run, I do have some major concerns about a world in which printed books have been almost completely replaced by e-books. My biggest worry is about whether our grandchildren and their children will ever be able to stumble upon treasured books in the way that I, and many generations before me, have always been able to do.

What do I mean by ‘stumble upon’? Well, the visual image is clear – you are walking down the street and you are tripped up by something lying on the footpath.  You examine it, and find that it is a bar of gold.  You have unexpectedly stumbled upon a treasure.  You didn’t set out that morning to look for gold bars, you didn’t contact all of your friends on Facebook to ask them where you were most likely to locate a gold bar, you didn’t do a Google search for maps of likely gold bar locations.  Nope, you were just walking down the street and – whoops! – well, look at that!  Can you imagine the delight you would feel?

It’s this kind of happy accidental find which I fear will no longer be possible in the realm of books in the future.

Apart from a ‘shop window’ promoting the latest best-sellers, all on-line book stores rely on the customer carrying out a search.  And the problem with searching is that you need to know what you are looking for before you start.  The latest Michael Connelly or Nora Roberts?  No problem.  The top-selling SF novel this year? Easy.  But what are we to do with a query like “I just want a really good read”? Or “I want to discover an author whose books I’m going to love for the rest of my life” ?  Or “Give me a book in a genre I’ve never before thought about trying” ?

In my case, throughout my life, the answers to these kinds of questions have come about as the result of accidentally stumbling upon great books.

Here are a few examples that come to mind:

• In the children’s lending library, at age 10, coming upon an interesting-looking volume called The Story of the Amulet; reading it with delight and only then discovering that it was the third in a series by its author E.Nesbit.  Going back and borrowing every book by that author which I could find.
• At home, hunting through my father’s modest collection of books, pulling out A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs and asking if I could read it, so discovering a life-long love of science fiction.
• In my early teens, finally allowed into the adult lending library, spotting a yellow-jacketed Gollancz SF novel called The City and the Stars by someone called Arthur C. Clarke, and having my mind blown away by an imagination leagues ahead of anything I had encountered before.
• Being given a tattered paperback by one of my father’s work friends: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. So far as I can recall, this was the first adult book I had ever owned, the founding stone of my collection of nearly 3,000 books.  I still have it.
• In my later teens, at the school library, borrowing a volume called The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, thinking it was science fiction, and instead discovering a fascinating historical story, awakening a  new and life-long interest in English history as a result.
• As an adult, picking up a book on a remainder table called And Always a Detective by R.F.Stewart.  It’s a history of detective fiction, and it spends a lot of time on someone called Wilkie Collins, whose novel The Moonstone (1868) is regarded as the precursor of the genre.  Going on to buy a copy of the latter. Falling in love with Collins’ work, becoming a huge fan.
• At a friend’s house, picking up a copy of The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett.  ”Yes, yes,” said the friend, “borrow it, you must read it!”.  Becoming besotted by this series of six historical novels.  Now, if asked what my favorite books of all time are, I point to this series.

It’s these kinds of discovery experiences which I fear may no longer be possible for our grandchildren in the brave new world of e-books.

The Beauty and Burden of Books

(First published in September 1992) 

There’s no doubt about it. I have too many books.

Too many is defined as: more books than I have shelf space for. My wife and I have instituted a very sensible rule which says that I’m not allowed to put up any more bookshelves; and I’m not allowed to buy any more books unless there is shelf space for them.

What this means is that I have to constantly cull my existing collection to get rid of the books that I don’t consider essential, to make room for any new ones.

And when I do this every few months (when my attempts to squash another new book on a shelf has resulted in a cascade over the side), I keep coming back to the basic philosophy of why I like to own books. My wife asks from time to time about a new purchase: “Couldn’t you get it from the library?”. Well, in some cases I could, but dammit, I want to own the book. But why? What are the reasons we want to possess books and keep them near us?

To read, yes. I don’t ever buy a book I don’t think I am going to read. I’m not a collector of first editions or of art books. If I buy a book, it is because I’d like to read it. Nevertheless, I calculate that I’ve only read about 60% of my collection. Out of a total of some 2,500 books, that means that I own some 1,000 books I haven’t read. Good grief! Will I ever read all of those books? Highly unlikely. And yet I still buy new books.

But why keep a book once I have read it? To re-read, of course. I love re-reading favourite books. I especially re-read a lot when my mind is at a low ebb. Re-reading is enjoyable because you know there aren’t going to be any unpleasant surprises!

And I do like to have reference books. I love to be able to look something up, either from casual interest, or because of a crossword or a competition in a newspaper, or to help my daughter with her homework. It peeves me no end if I can’t find the answer to some question in my own library.

Why else do I like to own books? I think a large part of it is just the sheer aesthetic pleasure of books. A well-made book is a beautiful thing to look at and handle. And rows of books generally look wonderful on the shelves, full of variety and interest. Despite my passion for computers, I can’t imagine electronic versions ever totally replacing the traditional book. There’s too much of a sensual pleasure in holding a book, feeling its weight and the texture of the cover under one’s fingers, turn ing the pages and being able to see at a glance how far you are from the end. In a very real sense, the technology of the printed book, the brilliantly appropriate techniques crafted and honed over nearly two thousand years, will take a lot of beating. Only when a computer version looks, feels and works like a book will there be substantial replacement of works printed in the traditional way.

But there is one dreaded aspect of books, and that is moving them. The volume and weight of numbers of books, once you take them down from the shelves, is simply astonishing. You can look up at a row of books on the shelves and think that you’ll easily fit them into a few cardboard boxes; but then when you try to do it, you find that you have filled all your boxes to the point where they are too heavy to lift, and you’ve only cleared half a shelf.

It’s also true that books have very little resale value. It makes me almost ill to see school fetes or markets selling hardback books for as little as 10 or 20 cents. To me, this devalues the worth and dignity of books.

Despite all that, I still love to own books, and I’ll certainly keep on buying them. I think perhaps half of the pleasure is browsing in a bookstore and finding a new treasure: a book long-sought-for, or a new volume dealing with a subject I’m really interested in.

Melbourne is reasonably well served with bookstores, but the best bookstores I’ve been to in Australia have been in Sydney, where they seem able to support quite specialist and academic bookstores like Abbeys. Their bookstores seem also to be much bigger: there’s nowhere in Melbourne as big as the Sydney Angus & Robertsons or their Dymock’s.

But when, clutching my new treasure, I get home and look up at the shelves, there’s that dreaded sinking feeling as I think:

“Now where is this going to fit…?”

Apple has recently been cracking down on iPhone and iPad apps selling content.  Basically, Apple wants a 30% cut of any revenue made through in-app purchases, a figure so high as to wipe out all of the profits of companies who are retailing such content, such as e-book retailers.  If they refuse to pay Apple that cut, Apple forces those retailers to remove, not only any mechanism for in-app purchases, not only any link to a web site where such purchases could be made, but even any mention of such a web site.  Personally, I think this is totally unreasonable.

Amazon complied with Apple’s rules and removed such links from its Kindle iPad app.  But now it has released a web page (rather a web app) for reading Kindle books, which completely avoids Apple’s restrictions and restores the ‘Shop in the Kindle Store’ button.  The web app is entirely written in javascript and HTML5, and is very impressive.  You have to log in and click a button tell the iPad to give the web app some more storage, but that simple process over, you are in.  If you create a home page bookmark for the web page, it feels almost entirely like a native iPad app.  Here’s what it looks like:

All of your Kindle purchases are visible in the Library view of the cloud-based app, and starting to read one of your books is as simple as touching its cover.  The app downloads the whole book, it appears, and it is then available to read even when you are offline.  Using it to read a book is almost identical to using the native app, with clean page turn animation (a simple slide).  All of this is very impressive, is a great demonstration of the power of HTML5 and resolves most of the concerns I had about web-based readers.  Impressive as it is, however, it does omit many of the better features of the native Kindle app such as search, dictionary look-up, annotations, and so on.  I presume this is because there is currently no way to pick up an event when the user holds down their finger over a particular word.

Amazon is clearly sticking out its tongue at Apple here to demonstrate that Apple really can’t control the purchasing process.

But I really find myself wondering just who exactly the cloud-based app is designed for. Why would I, or anyone, use this version of the app rather than the native Kindle app on an iPad?  Just so that we can have the joy of clicking on the Kindle Store button?  It was never a great inconvenience to me to simply use Safari to go to the Amazon site and make my selection that way.  As soon as Apple enforced its rules and Amazon removed the ‘Shop in the Kindle Store’ button, I created a bookmark to the Kindle Store on my home page.  No big deal.  I’d rather have the greater power of the native app, and I really hope Amazon don’t decide to remove it altogether.

Summary and Conclusions

It’s been quite exhausting looking at and writing about these nine e-reader applications, but now I’m ready to draw my thoughts together. I think my major conclusion is that there is no one perfect e-reader app, and further, that the best e-reader to use depends on what you are reading.

For my taste, there’s no question that if I am reading a novel I would prefer to do it with Apple’s iBooks app. It’s by far the most comfortable and well-featured, and its page numbering system gives me a real and natural feel of where I am in the book. But the faux hard-cover book decoration becomes annoying after a while, and I would prefer to be able to see a clean white page and not pretend that I’m using something that I am not. This unnecessary nonsense is particularly inappropriate when one is reading a text-book or reference work, and it does reduce the amount of text you can see at a reasonable font size.

I also greatly dislike iBooks’ PDF mode, and would far prefer to use a dedicated PDF reader like GoodReader for reading office-type documents in PDF format.

When it comes to textbooks or reference works, I would prefer using Bluefire Reader, I think. And I would also use Bluefire in preference to the other apps I have discussed, should I be unable to use iBooks for some reason.

The one e-reader application I would go out of my way to avoid: Adobe Digital Editions on the desktop.  It’s simply terrible to use and ugly to look at.

None of the apps I looked at would let you set layout options, font, and font-size on a per-book basis. I’m still waiting and hoping for someone to introduce this feature. It’s not a big ask, surely, just a small amount of data to be stored with each book, in just the same way that these applications store metadata such as title and author on a per-book basis.

The Elephant in the Room

But there’s an elephant in the room which I have been ignoring up until now.  And that is that which e-reader you use is likely to be forced on you by where you bought a particular e-book.  I’ve been able to ignore this very important issue up until now because I have been looking just at one book to which I own the rights, (my collection of SF stories Islands). This has enabled me to compare the same book in different e-readers without having to purchase, say, the iBooks version, the Kindle version, the Kobo Books version, and so on.

But, short of using suspect software to remove the digital rights management (DRM) from a particular book, the average iPad user is going to be stuck with having to use the appropriate reader app associated with the store where they bought the book.  For example, I bought The Attenbury Emeralds by Jill Paton Walsh from the Amazon Kindle Store.  Regardless of what I think of the Kindle e-reader app on the iPad, I don’t have any choice – I have to read that book in the Kindle app.  Similarly, I bought Beginning iOS 4 in the iBooks store.  If I want to use the Bluefire Reader to read it – nope, tough luck!  And this is probably why we have so many different e-readers available; each e-book retailer cranks out their own version because they want you to be locked into their store.  (By the way, I wasn’t able to review Barnes and Noble’s Nook e-reader app because it’s not available here in Australia).

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a single great e-book reader for the iPad which was able to read books from every store? Or else if there was complete inter-operability between apps, so that you could read an iBook in the Kindle app if you preferred, or vice-versa?  Alas, that’s not going to happen because of the entrenched interests of the book retailers.

The closest we come to such interoperability are with books whose DRM is based on Adobe’s Adept technology.  Fortunately, outside of Apple and Amazon, most e-book retailers sell ePub format with this version of DRM.  (Actually, I can’t believe I just wrote that – what would be fortunate would be if there was no DRM!)

For example, Kobo and Books on Board both sell books this way, and they are where I buy most of my e-books.  Also, my local library will lend me books with Adept DRM.  This means that, with a bit of work, I can read such books in Bluefire, which authenticates you against your Adobe ID; and you can read Kobo books in Bluefire.  (For some reason however, Kobo refuses to read Adept-DRM books bought outside of its store).  The ‘bit of work’ is that I have to plug my iPad into my computer, run iTunes, and drag and drop the ePub files into the appropriate application’s folder in iTunes.  I’m hoping this will be a lot easier when Apple introduce its iCloud technology, but I’m not counting on it.  And the less said about Apple’s petty insistence that e-book apps remove ‘purchase’ buttons linking to their associated stores, the better.

If you can get hold of DRM-free books from legitimate sources, or if you do somehow (illegally) remove the DRM from a book, then of course, the world is your oyster.  DRM-free ePub books will open in iBooks, Stanza, Bluefire, Nook, Kobo apps on the iPad, or in Calibre or Adobe Digital Editions (yuk!) on your computer.

All of this just demonstrates to me how annoying digital rights management is to the normal, honest, customer.  I’m sure it doesn’t bother pirates in the least.  One day, perhaps, the publishers will realize this, like the record companies have done, and free us up from all this nonsense.

Previous article in this series: Adobe Digital Editions
First article in this series: Introduction

Adobe Digital Editions

And so we come to Adobe Digital Editions. Most e-book vendors release their books in ePub or PDF formats which have been protected by Adobe’s Adept DRM technology, and so usually require you to have Adobe Digital Editions on your PC or Mac to download and read the books you have bought.

Considering this, and considering the fact that it is produced by Adobe – maker of Photoshop, InDesign, AfterEffects and all such high level design tools – it is astonishing to me how poorly designed and non-functional Digital Editions is.

I should perhaps emphasize that Adobe Digital Editions (let’s just call it ADE from now on) is a desktop application, not an iPad app, unlike most of the other e-readers I have been discussing in this series.  Its prime function is to act as an e-book manager and reader on your computer.  I won’t discuss the downloading and library management aspects in this post, but will concentrate on its use as a reader.

Reading Comfort

For a start, I hate the customized Adobe ‘chrome’ in this application, which makes it feel not in the least like a Windows application, and is also (to my taste) very ugly – beige text on a browny-slate background. I checked it out on my MacBook as well, and it’s as bad, if not worse, on that platform. We get the same look with the Mac title bar and status bar glommed on the top and bottom.  You could argue that I’m being too tough here – in my last post I discussed Calibre, whose interface design is fairly pedestrian.  But at least Calibre fits within most Windows UI conventions.  And this is Adobe, king of design applications!

As in Calibre, we get no margins, and no way to create them.  I find this uncomfortable for reading, I don’t like the way the text completely fills the reading pane.  This is even more uncomfortable once we move away from a chapter heading.

Page turning can be done by using the right and left arrow keys, but there is no transition at all, just a straight cut.  You can also scroll the text continuously with the up and down arrow keys, or ‘page’ with the PageUp and PageDown keys.  All this is fine, I guess, but you lose any sense of reading a book with individual, separate pages. Page numbering, because of this, is only very notional but at least the location numbers shown fall within approximately the right range for a book, unlike the crazy high numbers you see in Kindle locations.

All of this makes for uncomfortable reading, even on a mobile computer like a laptop or netbook.  I would hate to have to read a long novel in ADE.

Controls and Settings

It seems that what you see is what you get in ADE.  Here are the controls at the top of the reading window:

Here we have Library View / Reading View / READING menu / Location / Print / Bookmark this page / Reduce font size / Enlarge font size / Search .  These should all be self-explanatory, though I will discuss Search in more detail later.

The drop-down menu under READING gives you these choices:

Again, the function of these should be fairly obvious.

There appear to be no hidden controls or settings.  In fact, there seems to be no way to change any of the layout, such as margins, line spacing, paragraph spacing, and so on.  You can’t change the font.  I can forgive this in Calibre, but not in a product from Adobe.  It is true that the layout, font, and so on shown in this example (my collection of SF stories Islands) are true to the original ePub settings.  But most e-reader apps allow the user some control over layout aspects to suit their personal preference.

I thought for a second that I had found a settings or preferences function.  I right-clicked on the text and up came a context menu with one item – Settings.  But what you get in fact is the crazy-mad Adobe Flash settings, which must be completely confusing to the average user, and have nothing to do with the reading application:

I can’t see what this does except to act as a poor demonstration of the Flash technology.  In fact, the Flash nature of the whole application is a nuisance, because there are no right-click context menus anywhere in it.  All you get when you right click on anything is this silly Flash Settings dialog.

Navigation

You can type a location number (with some difficulty, it must be said) into the location indicator at the top center of the window to go to that ‘page’.  Or use the Table of Contents. That’s it.

Searching

You type your search term into the search field at the top right, and you are taken to the first instance, and can move between found instances using the tiny left and right arrow controls next to the search field.

While this is functional, it’s also pretty pedestrian.

Table of Contents

The Table of Contents is always visible at the left of the reading pane. I actually don’t mind this, and it works well.

Library View

This is ADE’s library view. The point I would make here is not so much about Adobe, but perhaps about the way some ePubs are formatted to yield very ugly covers:

I’m not sure if this is down to ADE or the formatting of the books, but compare this ugly, ugly view of most of the books with what you see in Calibre, or in the Kobo or in Kindle library views.  I think ADE is just picking up the first image in the books, rather than the image which has been nominated as the cover in the metadata.  What’s the point of seeing the Penguin Books logo as the cover of ‘The Complete Novels of George Orwell’ ?

Extra Features

Zip. There aren’t any.  You can highlight a word or phrase, and then go to the READING drop down menu to copy or print it, but that’s about it.  No dictionary, no means of permanently highlighting, no means of making notes, nothing.

Conclusion

As you can probably tell, I really dislike Adobe Digital Editions.  It seems to me poorly designed, badly thought out, and imposed on us by the widespread use of Adobe’s Digital Rights Management scheme (which I hate anyway).

Reading a long book in ADE would seem like a penance rather than a joy.

Previous article in this series: Calibre Ebook Viewer
Next article in this series: Summary and Conclusions