Adobe and Amazon.com Announce Alliance

Posted on April 11, 2001

Adobe Systems Incorporated, a provider of publishing software, and Amazon.com, an online retailer, announced a global alliance to offer the Adobe Acrobat ebook reader software in Amazon.com's ebook store. The site will offer nearly two thousand Adobe Portable Document Format- (PDF) based ebooks. Over the next 12 months, the two companies plan to extend the alliance to Amazon's international sites in France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom. Amazon cut a deal with Microsoft in November, 2000 and already features ebooks available in the Microsoft Reader format.

As part of the deal, customers visiting Amazon.com's ebooks store can download the Acrobat ebook reader software and download Adobe PDF titles. Some of the titles are: The Blue Nowhere, by Jeffery Deaver (Simon & Schuster); Ordinary People, Extraordinary Wealth, by Ric Edelman (Harper Collins); The Big Red Fez, by Seth Godin (Seth Godin Publishers); and Profit From the Core: Growth Strategy in an Era of Turbulence, by Chris Zook (Harvard Business School Press). The digital selection also includes business content from Meta Group and articles from the Harvard Business Review; travel-related ebooks covering specific regions from Publications Unbound; and color, graphical children's books such as Barney Is It Time Yet? (iPicturebooks).

Michael Looney, senior director of ebooks at Adobe, says in a statement, "Because Amazon.com is a company born and bred in the digital age, the company understands that the reach of ebooks is much bigger than mainstream novels and consumer titles. By teaming with Amazon.com, we will give consumers world-wide a graphically-rich, interactive eBook reading experience with the added ability to print content. Mobile professionals and students in particular can leverage these benefits with eBooks such as financial reports and course packets."