Adobe Digital Editions Reviews

by Elfmantoo

I’m disappointed in ADE. I had no problem loading in DRM ePub and reading them. However, I find ADE very lacking in features. Features like word definitions, phrase translation, underlining and highlighting in various colors, ability to google and hotlink to places, people and art described in ebooks. I was a big fan and user for many years of Neosoar another DRM e reader. Unfortunately, they seem to be recently out business. It took a while for Neosoar to get to a point of near perfection with these features I’ve listed above. But the absolute best was your annotations were linked to Dropbox. So, any additions or notations or hotlinks would be saved in Dropbox. If you changed or upgraded your e reader you would upload the DRM e book and sync with Dropbox and all your annotations would appear. You would not lose any annotations. Neosoar is a great loss to those of us need an e reader that is fully connected to power of the internet. It is unfortunate that ADE does not measure up. In the future it could if Adobe puts in the effort.

by Holland EW

This deserves 0 stars. Didn’t even use it for reading, because I spent 30 minutes troubleshooting how to even upload ONE BOOK FILE INTO AdobeDigitalEditions , only to have AdobeDigitalEditions reject my Adobe ID. There is no in-app way to upload files. Let me just repeat that, once more: *THERE IS NO IN-APP WAY TO UPLOAD FILES*. This is a READING APP. An app for reading books!!! And there is NO WAY TO IMPORT. You have to do it manually, through your device’s files. “Did you google it?” Of course I did, and adobe only has instructions for their desktop app version, because they clearly think AdobeDigitalEditions is trash not worth explaining, too. And did I mention it didn’t even accept my Adobe ID? Garbage, trash, a dumpster that’s not even worth setting aflame because of how absolutely useless it is.

by Hookem92

I recently purchased a professional therapeutic evaluation tool in digital format that is published and accessible only on the Adobe Digital Editions app. The material was not inexpensive. I had never heard of this Adobe app before, but I followed the instructions and downloaded AdobeDigitalEditions so that I could have access to my purchased material.
AdobeDigitalEditions is terrible. It does not render pages clearly. There is no way to print a page, which is a vital feature of what I purchased. Scrolling is choppy at best. There is nothing redeemable about AdobeDigitalEditions at all. Adobe needs to do some serious work to make it usable. In its current state it is completely unusable.
If I could rat it negative 5 stars I would.

by Travelgem2

I am dumbfounded that Adobe would produce a product that is so bad and useless. It simply does not work. People are complaining about the lack of features but the main problem is that the pages do not load consistently. What is the point of an e-reader if the pages are blank? If this were my first Adobe experience, I would not use any of their products. Clearly, Adobe is not vested in AdobeDigitalEditions as they have not addressed the complaints. There are so many books and so little time…I think I will just stick to my Kindle and ignore ePub formatted books! I much prefer reading on Kindle rather than in my browser.

by M. Holmes

I am required to use AdobeDigitalEditions to access online resources from my university library. For one book, it took me an hour to go from reserving it at my uni library to downloading it onto my iPad. Once I did download it, I noticed that the rendering of the text is confusing and frequently misaligned or beyond the limits of the screen space. Scrolling at even a moderate pace causes freezing. Reading to study, I was naturally interested in having my highlights exported to add to my digital notes, but that's not possible. AdobeDigitalEditions feels like something made over a decade ago. For a company that charges so much for most of its products and is so terribly hyper-vigilant about maintaining its siloed ecosystem, I expected better.

by EmoEric87

If you’ve ever thought to yourself, how can we make the process of obtaining a digital copy of a book more difficult and then, once the poor idiots figure out how to do it, how can we make the experience as excruciating, rudimentary, and utterly disconnected from the rest of the 21st century as possible... you probably designed AdobeDigitalEditions. The designers haven’t even figured out how to fit pages onto your device. YOU CANT EVEN READ THE PAGES CORRECTLY, because AdobeDigitalEditions hasn’t been updated to Apple’s own screen real estate standards. The notch on my iPhone fully obscures the top of every page. What person who wants to read would actually choose AdobeDigitalEditions? Has anyone from Adobe who actually reads books tried to use AdobeDigitalEditions? My guess is no.

by Nevermore1976

I have to use AdobeDigitalEditions for a required textbook for a class and it’s horrible. It keeps freezing and will jump around to random pages in the book. When you go to “turn” a page it will sometimes skip back and forth over the page you are trying to get to - it will go forward 2 or 3 pages and when you try to page back it will go back 2-3 pages and it can take a dozen or two tries to get the page you need. If you try to access a page through the table of contents it takes you to some other random page. I do not have these issues with the program on my Windows laptop, it seems to only be an issue with iOS.

by TheStaffSergeant

Been using AdobeDigitalEditions for a while now on my iPhone and it is frustrating me to no end. It keeps syncing blank books to my device and then constantly crashes. As if that wasn’t frustrating enough, there isn’t a way to mass delete all those blank books and there over 400 of them! I went through and manually deleted them ALL.... then I thought I might uninstall AdobeDigitalEditions and retry... nope... it just re-sync those 400+ blank books all over again. I would like to have all the hours of my life back that I invested into AdobeDigitalEditions, but I’m doubtful Adobe can make that happen. Perhaps if they enabled two-page view and fixed the glitch where it keeps crashing and syncing blank books... I might be able to forgive them.

by Drjefferson

This software essentially does nothing. It does not crash (for me anyway), it just does nothing except show you a manual that supposedly describes how to use it. But the manual as both wrong in many places, and it’s pagination does not even match its table of contents.

The thing I wanted it to do most is share ADE’s with my the same software on my Mac, which the manual explicitly states is possible. But after working for a couple of hours at it, it seems impossible to do that. There are simply no commands to allow you to either share a library with the Mac or download books from the Mac library. In fact, there are no commands to do anything useful. You can’t search for ADE’s, or borrow them or purchase them or anything else.

I am just stunned at how worthless AdobeDigitalEditions is.

by Awesomexyz22

I finally settled down to read the book I paid good money to download to the iPad. After reading the first few pages, I was glad I finally had some time. As I flipped the page I was like “ what the f@#k, the page is blank. I flipped through the book, and all my books and learned that many pages were blank. How does a multi billion dollar company screw this up so bad? It was bad enough going through the very unused friendly process to get the books I purchased downloaded. Now this. I think the management team at Adobe needs to look through all these wonderful reviews and learn from them instead of counting all their bonus money on the golf course.

by Gorgeeus

I HAVE to use AdobeDigitalEditions for the books for my class. This is the absolute worst experience I’ve ever had trying to access my course material through digital means. The font is so small, and when I attempt to zoom in out it, it skips like five pages forward! This is extremely difficult to do my homework while on vacation, actually the only reason I’m leaving this review is because all of a sudden the book froze on AdobeDigitalEditions , I tried to reinstall the book it’s self without reinstalling the entire app, it didn’t work! So then I deleted the entire app, and in doing so noticed the poor reviews and decided to leave one myself. I’m annoyed. I’m shocked that as big as a company Adobe is, they thought it was ok to develop this crappy app!!!

by Tessa79

I concur with other reviewers who have down rated AdobeDigitalEditions. My advice: if there’s a digital book that you want to buy that requires Adobe Digital Editions, just don’t buy the digital book! Find another format to buy it in if you can. AdobeDigitalEditions has given me so much frustration and it’s only getting worse. I don’t think the developer reads these reviews or cares because there have been no updates to AdobeDigitalEditions in over a year now. This is the reason performance of AdobeDigitalEditions just keeps getting worse. Publishers also need to STOP OFFERING DIGITAL BOOKS REQUIRING AdobeDigitalEditions. It becomes very unfair to the buyers of your products.
How Adobe can associate its name with this - I have no idea. If you don’t want to update AdobeDigitalEditions can you please just render it obsolete and stop wasting everybody’s time & money.

by Sacrimony

When I first began to use ADE, I thought there was no way the ratings could be true - that AdobeDigitalEditions was somehow THAT bad. On desktop versions, it won’t allow you access to an “account” page to even figure out what email you’re “licensing” under, which makes it near impossible to use the same account on other devices. It is INCREDIBLY counterintuitive.
Now that I’m having to read textbooks for my courses on here, and frequently using the highlighting function, I find that every few minutes AdobeDigitalEditions will crash. When it crashes it not only sends me BACK to the page I was on minutes before the crash, but it will also ERASE all of my highlighting. Why any service would voluntarily provide .acsm format ebooks (looking at you University of Chicago Press) when AdobeDigitalEditions is THIS bad, and not give you ANY alternatives ie beyond me.

by Aseudos

I tried using Apple's built-in screen reader to read books on AdobeDigitalEditions, but AdobeDigitalEditions does not allow it to work at all. No matter what book I try to read, it will only read the page number and nothing else. I'm not sure if this incompatibility is specifically with Apple or if other screen readers don't work with AdobeDigitalEditions either. Regardless, it is extremely frustrating, especially since AdobeDigitalEditions is the only way I can access ebooks through my university's library. Clearly Adobe did not give the slightest consideration to accessibility when creating AdobeDigitalEditions. Strangely, it is only the mobile app that has this problem. The desktop app works perfectly fine on my Macbook, which is how I know that the mobile app is the problem, not the books I downloaded.

by Susanroar

There must be quite the financial incentive for publishers to use AdobeDigitalEditions instead of Kindle or one of the others, because I increasingly find it to be my only option with some library books. Its basic, no-frills format would not be a big deal if the danged thing actually worked! But it’s SO FRUSTRATING to use, with the constant freezing and constant absolutely blank pages. Which I guess is freezing, idk- I’ve waited very long periods of time but the words won’t populate until I take some further action. Absolutely horrible.

It took me forever to even figure out why “EPub” stopped being available in the EPub app! I could not figure out what I was doing wrong until finally located the painful instructions in Support.

There have been so many digital library books that I waited a long time for, and when I see that it’s an “EPub” book after finally reaching the top of the wait list, I decline it. I read for pleasure; ADE makes reading excruciating. I just finished reading 2 that I had waited weeks for - F-bombs frequently flying during the course of it - and it will be a long time before I do it again.

I feel very badly for students who have no alternative, for their e-textbooks.

by Nich.am

I tried our Adobe Digital Editions because it seemed easier than waiting for the library to open and go through all their COVID restrictions to get a book. Why get a physical copy when I have a perfectly good iPad and the library is offering an eBook? Well now I have to go get the physical copy because Adobe Digital Editions only lets me read roughly five pages at a time before it glitches and won’t advance a page. Only gets stuck on a blank white screen. It’s not a simple fix either. Closing AdobeDigitalEditions and reopening it doesn’t do anything. The book is now “expired” despite the fact I just checked it out an hour ago. I’m shocked this is even an Adobe product. They should be ashamed of how poorly it works. A group of college freshmen could probably make an app 100x better than this, or at least one that works MORE than this Adobe product does. Jeez.

by A.Robin18

I travel a lot and only have an I pad for a computer, it works fine with almost everything but whenever I need adobe for something it is a mess. I have the most recent I pad and it is just as powerful as a computer but for some reason adobe removes basic functions of applications in the I pad IOS. I have been trying to trouble shoot so I can authorize my e-reader with adobe using my i pad so I can download library epubs, there is no way I can trouble shoot this and now I need to hunt down someone who will let me run ADE to download simple library books, this is ridiculous and furthering my disgust with adobe products. Adobe do better and stop limiting I pad IOS, this has been an issue for years now and honestly I am beyond fed up, there is no reason with the power of current I pads to limit them like this, they function essentially as computer.

by SunnerLife

I have recently needed to download AdobeDigitalEditions since an ebook was only available through Adobe’s DRM. So far the MacOS version is serviceable—not the best navigation but you can get around. The iOS version is unusable. It crashes during searches, pages are missing or unreadable (don’t know if this is a scanning issue, but why then does it work on the macOS version?), and navigation is neglible.

Many many people read ePubs on a tablet like the iPad, so it boggles my mind that a company like Adobe wouldn’t put some effort into this product. I imagine with Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks taking a lot of the market share, perhaps there is not enough market left to tempt them.

But I suspect that there are plenty of authors/publishers who would like to skip the massive fees that both companies impose, so there is a real Power-to-the-Author-People market that can develop here if they play their cards right.

by Toedoe4

this is the only app that my school has recommended we use for our downloads. my main issue is that when i download my slide notes, it will double and sometimes even triple the downloads and causes it to take up space and glitch out. if i try to delete the duplicates, my original file won’t work. i don’t understand why this is an issue. and even if i receive the one download, it won’t save correctly unless i flip through some of the pages before i return to the home screen. the only way i’ve found it to work is by downloading one thing individually and flipping through it when i just need to download multiple one after the other and THEN go back and read them. i only do this so i can access them offline at home but i can’t even do that.

by LeahIrving

There are problems that me and all of my classmates mentioned while we were using AdobeDigitalEditions. The main problem is that it lags and stops a lot if you are using it offline. When you flip through pages too much, it starts to freeze for a while before you can flip the pages again. So when we were looking for a certain page in our ebook, AdobeDigitalEditions lagged every 10-15 seconds. This happens less frequently with internet connection, but it can still happen. Especially if AdobeDigitalEditions has not loaded certain parts of the book yet.
Another problem is that there isn't a simpler way to find a certain page. Even though AdobeDigitalEditions has a scroller that helps you jump through the pages, it doesn't indicate which page you're going to flip to. If there's a way you can do this in the future, that would be good as well.
TL;DR I don't recommend AdobeDigitalEditions for anyone who wants to use this for ebooks. Whether for educational or recreational purposes. It's better if you find an app that can do so much better until Adobe fixes these problems. It's not worth it.

by Wild Type

I tried to use AdobeDigitalEditions to download Overdrive e-books borrowed from our county library. AdobeDigitalEditions fails to connect with the fulfillment server, so e-books can't download. I tried AdobeDigitalEditions on my iPhone 5S, iPad Air 2 and Samsung tablet, with the same frustrating results. I was however able to successfully use the PC version of Adobe Digital Editions, and can transfer downloaded e-books onto my Nook Simple Touch Reader. For smartphone and tablet users who want to borrow Overdrive e-books from a library, I would highly recommend the Libby app. It's excellent!

by Polishhhhhhhhhh

I’m stunned at AdobeDigitalEditions. I figured I would be able to switch back and forth between phone and computer as long as the same Adobe ID was on both — nope. Not at all. From what I can see, there’s no way to connect the two outside of manually connecting my phone and dumping the files in. It’s very obvious that this program is not intended for smart phones or tablets and is only a way to read certain book formats. Definitely not what I thought it was going to be and I will not be keeping it.

by IReviewedU

AdobeDigitalEditions is nearly unusable. The ONLY reason I use it is because e-textbooks often ONLY come in this format. Half the time I tap a bookmark, highlight, or chapter, it will not even navigate to that page but rather stay on the current page. Furthermore, bookmarks and highlights DO NOT sync across devices. And when I swipe between pages, I usually have to swipe 2-3 times to achieve a successful page turn. The UI is too sparse to be all that useful in an academic environment. Avoid AdobeDigitalEditions if possible.

by Artakv

I must say this is the disgrace of Adobe brand to have an application of such quality.
1. The navigation in AdobeDigitalEditions doesn’t function.
2. App opens books on the first page of a last viewed chapter, disregarding that user has already reached, let say, page 25 of that chapter.
3. No scrolling available. One has to go through page-by-page to reach to the last page that was stopped at during last reading.
4. “Define” - option to look up definition of words doesn’t recognize words from punctuation marks and does not allow to mark the word without the marks. Like if there is a word followed by comma - example, - trying to mark the word example will highlight the word and the comma together and then Define function does not recognize the word as the comma is included.
Adobe, you must do better!

by Knojd

Wow I can see why theirs such a low rating on AdobeDigitalEditions. I was completely unable to download books per the instructions within AdobeDigitalEditions , even after “authorizing” my account. I contacted support. They first sent me a link to a user forum which I couldn’t reach because “content is restricted.” Then they sent me to FAQs which didn’t even apply to my situation. They had me wait for a while then finally came back with “[My name] we dn't support this issue here . You need to go with the forum .” (Spelling and punctuation mistakes his). Just wow.

by Whatabass

Doesn’t sync reading history, bookmarks, or highlights across devices. Turn phone sideways and it automatically takes me back to the beginning of the chapter. Search doesn’t bring up complete results. “Go to page” and “go to bookmark” both bring up incorrect pages. Every other time I open the book it starts back at the beginning and I have to find the page again. Program is both faulty and inconvenient, yet the only choice I had for this particular book I purchased.

by Ankank

Most Bay Area technology vendors design their products to wow the user. They make it easy for the consumer to sign up and get started in mere seconds and then have a pleasurable experience as you use the product.
Not these guys. Not at all.
It looks like the User’s experience is the last thing on Adobe’s mind.
They just don’t care if you like it or not. They still design their products as if it were the 1990s.
Rest assured you will have a frustrating and infuriating experience with AdobeDigitalEditions that will turn you off from using any Adobe product at all.

by Benjamin John Parker

The purpose of consumer technology is to make human lives easier and more efficient. This product does precisely the opposite. By inserting itself clumsily into what were previously smooth workflows, it hampers experience at every turn. Poor user interface, many lags and glitches, impossibly restrictive sharing features. This is several steps backwards from Gutenberg, to wit, I would much prefer bound volumes I could keep at my desk--they would be so much easier to use. This entire product is a dark smirch on Adobe's good name. If I see that a book is available through Adobe Digital Editions, next time I will be wise enough to run the other way.

by Gatoqueso

Using AdobeDigitalEditions for my school textbook... it is constantly crashing. Super hard to focus on studying when I have to force close then reopen AdobeDigitalEditions every 5 minutes. Even then it still glitches. Will get stuck between pages while scrolling. Worst of all I have to minimize AdobeDigitalEditions after reading and highlighting each page because it will delete any highlighting if it crashes. I figured out that minimizing will “save” your highlights. Unfortunately my textbook is not available in any other format (I checked) or else this would’ve been deleted after the first day it was installed. I hope it gets fixed!

by I Hate Yahoo Apps

After using a kindle to read books for a couple years, this is easily just one of the worst apps I’ve ever used.

It constantly loses your page, even after just going back and forth between apps. The text is very unpleasant on the eyes. Always glitching and bringing you to a random page.

I got duped into using AdobeDigitalEditions after using a gift card from BAM to buy ebooks. This is the only app you can read BAM’s ebooks on. BAM what are you doing?!?! I’ll never buy an ebook from them again

by Interupting Doodle

Purchased an ebook that required Adobe Digital Editions but cannot download it onto my iOS 13 devices. When you click the download link, the file gets downloaded, without any notice, into a downloads folder I the newly existent Files. Unfortunately, I cannot load it into ADE as it is not one of the places I can “share” to from the downloads folder. I visited the adobe users group, where I found out where all 9 of my download attempts had disappeared into. So waiting for the update from somebody.

by Calion

AdobeDigitalEditions is almost indescribably bad. Scrolling is difficult and jerky, zoom settings do not stick from page to page, it’s very difficult to scrub through pages to find things, highlighting is so bad as to be useless (it highlights an entirely different part of the page from what you attempted to select)—in short, it offers little of the usability of a good PDF reader. I presume this is because it is for captive audiences like students who have to read protected textbooks.