Adobe remains committed to the e-book market, although Bruce Chizen, the company's CEO, acknowledged at a financial conference late last month that "we think e-books is going to be a growth category, but it's going to happen much later than we anticipated." The e-book department took only a slight hit in the recently announced companywide reorganization, which will result in the elimination of 150 positions. An Adobe spokesperson said the cutbacks "won't affect how much we work with e-books."
To help spur wider acceptance of e-books, James Alexander, who was recently named director of e-books for Adobe, announced at the National Institute of Standards and Technology conference (see p. 17) that Adobe will eliminate transaction fees in its digital rights management, charging only an upfront cost for the software. He added that the eReader software will become part of the popular Adobe Reader, already on hundreds of millions of computers worldwide.
