Adobe in Deals with InterTrust, Amazon, Palm

In a series of moves that will advance its interests in electronic publishing and e-commerce, Adobe Acrobat announced an agreement with Amazon.com to sell e-books in the Adobe e-book reader format, reached an agreement with DRM provider InterTrust and released an Adobe e-book reader for reading documents on Palm OS handheld devices.

Amazon.com's e-book store will now offer an initial selection of about 2,000 e-books in Adobe PDF format, readable with the newly released Adobe e-book reader. The Amazon.com e-book store initially offered e-book titles only in the Microsoft Reader format. The Acrobat e-book reader is free to download.

InterTrust Technologies signed a deal with Adobe to incorporate its docBox digital rights management platform into Adobe Acrobat 5.0, the newest upgrade of the popular application for reading electronic documents in the PDF format. The InterTrust DRM technology will give publishers "persistent" protection for digital content and will provide tools and services for managing digital content and its distribution.

Derek Brown, InterTrust v-p of developer services, told PW the InterTrust DRM platform will allow super distribution—consumers can easily forward content along with variable access restrictions—and allow publishers to set multiple subscription modes for content in the PDF format. InterTrust DRM will also allow PDF content to make use of InterTrust's MetaTrust Utility, a network of InterTrust partners that provide a wide range of e-commerce services.

Adobe also announced the release of a beta version of the long-anticipated Acrobat Reader for Palm OS handheld devices. Currently, available versions of Acrobat (including Acrobat 5.0 and the e-book reader) are for use only on laptop and desktop computers. The beta version of Acrobat for Palm OS as well as Adobe Acrobat 5.0 is available for free download through the Adobe Web site at www.adobe.com