Adobe Digital Editions 1.7

Adobe Digital Editions is a simple tool to help you manage and view your eBooks.

At a minimum you might want to use the program as a basic eBook reader. And this is easy enough. Just drag and drop your chosen file onto the program - PDF, PDF/A and EPUB formats are supported, as are eBooks with embedded SWF files - and it'll appear.

Reading is then fairly straightforward. There are a few basic viewing options, so you can display one or two pages on the screen at a time, increase or decrease text size at a click, and scroll through the book using your mouse or the keyboard. You get a simple text search tool, and the ability to create bookmarks on particular pages, and of course there's a print option, too. So we're not talking feature-rich here, but if you just want to read then there's enough to get by.

Adobe Digital Editions can also manage your eBooks, by maintaining them in its own library. Every time you drag and drop an item onto the program, it's added to the "All Items" bookshelf, which makes it easy to find and reload later. And you can also create additional bookshelves, then drag and drop eBooks to categorise them as you like: "Holiday Reading", "Sci-fi", "Favourites", whatever suits your needs.

And if you own copy-protected eBooks, then Adobe Digital Editions can help you to transfer them onto other computers or devices, so you can read your collection wherever you are.

It doesn't have the longest of feature lists, but if you just want to read then Adobe Digital Editions will probably be enough. It's also easy to use, and had no problem opening whatever PDF and ePub files we threw at it.