Acrobat and Naked Conversations

I’ve been reading ebooks for a long time.  But last night I downloaded my first Adobe Acrobat formatted ebook, Naked Conversations, by Robert Scoble and Shel Isreal.  I had been eye-balling this book since I first started “hearing” Robert talk about it in the beginning.  When it was finally published, I definitely wanted to read it.  But how to get it?   I assumed I would order it from Amazon and have someone “mule” it over for me from the US in the spring.    I was very surprised, therefore, to find a digital edition on Amazon.  Until now, all the ebooks I’ve purchased have been through Fictionwise or E-reader.  I had never really considered Amazon as an ebook retailer!  I don’t know how I missed that.

 

I started reading and immediately found things I wanted to underline, highlight or remember.  Acrobat does’t handle annotations all that well, nothing like “PDF Annotator.”  But I learned that it does do some things PDF Annotator doesn’t.  I had a vague memory of Tracy at StudentTabletPC talking about using Acrobat to annotate.  I went back to search on her site and found this post.

 

Oh my word.  When you underline or highlight in Acrobat it actually keeps a reference of all those things you’ve marked up.  You can’t mark up in ink, but you can underline and highlight.  One of my good friends is working on his doctoral dissertation on leadership development dynamics in the Balkans and I immediately thought of him.  Can you imagine doing serious research and marking up your ebooks as you go?  When you’re done working through a book you can generate an abstract of all the comments you made, complete with page number!

 

I’m not sure I’m converted to Acrobat as an ebook reader yet, but it sure has a lot of potential.  If Adobe would just get on the bus and support ink, we’d they’d have a pretty killer app.  Okay, now I’m going to get back to my reading.