Does Apple Want To Be King Of Ebooks?
End Game: Why Apple Will Buy Adobe
What I DO see happening is Apple buying Adobe, which would give it effective dominance of digital content creation and distribution on a global scale. Bruce Chizen suddenly stepped down as Adobe’s CEO without warning: why? A caretaker CEO (my characterization — no slight intended) is in place. Steve has always viewed Adobe co-founder and co-chair John Warnock like a father. Warnock and co-chair Chuck Geschke are losing interest in Adobe day-to-day as they move on with their lives. Acquiring Adobe would make Apple much more of a cross-platform company. The combined professional applications could be placed in the Adobe division of Apple where they could go up in price for some markets, becoming VASTLY more profitable. But most important — keeping in mind the whole purpose here is driving content distribution — merging Flash and QuickTime would make any other video standards (like Windows Media) simply immaterial.
Apple would suddenly be King of Ebooks.
Adobe is, I think, the lead participant in the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), which is working on a universal file format for ebooks called .epub.
Adobe also has Adobe Digital Editions, which can read .epub files. It’s also being ported to the Sony Reader.
And we just had a tech demo from Sony this week of improved PDF support on their Reader. PDF belongs to Adobe and is a universal file format for electronic publishing.
Cringely has focused solely on the moving media aspect of an Apple acquisition of Adobe. Any such merger would also remap the world of static media — ebooks — dramatically.
iPhone library in your pocket with wireless e-purchasing?
Mike Cane 2008 
January 12, 2008 at 3:47 pm
personally, i find this about as likely as the saudi’s & opec just handing all oil contracts over to the u.s. gratis, out of the goodness of their hearts, but it’s nice to speculate. but saying it was true, does this mean apple would suddenly totally *pwn* the kindle?? hawr-hawr, amazon. too bad, so sad. sucks to be you.
January 12, 2008 at 5:25 pm
It sucks to be amazon anyway. Just look at the Kindle! Ew.
January 16, 2008 at 5:44 pm
[…] Posted January 17, 2008 Many of us hope that Apple will enter the ebook marketplace – and mimic the itunes/ipod experience in the […]
May 2, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Amazon swears they’re selling the Kindle as fast as they can make them.