A problem I’ve always had with PDF books is marking the point where I left off reading to continue later. Over the past few years, PDF books have become popular and I primarily consume books from Pragmatic Programmers in this format. A simple 5- or 10-page PDF document can be read in a matter of minutes, but a 500- or 600-page book cannot be consumed at once. It’s in these cases that an adapted reader is necessary.

On the Mac I was using Skim, a PDF reader that allows annotations and other modifications to the PDF that only Adobe Acrobat would allow, the difference being that Skim is open source. With Skim, you can use a reading bar that helps a lot when reading, especially for those who jump lines like me :-D

But as with all great Mac apps, Skim doesn’t have a version for Windows and also doesn’t record the last page of each PDF… making book reading difficult. To overcome this type of problem, I ended up using notes on my phone to record the page where I left off in each book, truly low-tech.

Last week I found Adobe Digital Editions, free and multi-platform, developed by the same company that invented the PDF format. It was created to allow access to digital books from Adobe’s e-book platform, but can also be used to read already downloaded PDF or ePub files. The big advantage is being able to use the library feature, allowing you to combine scattered PDFs on your hard drive into a single interface, organize these PDFs in folders and mark where you left off easily. In Digital Editions, when I re-open a PDF it’s exactly in the same position as I left it last time. The interface is clean and facilitates reading, with only basic navigation and viewing controls for the PDF and optionally content on the left.

I haven’t tested it on several PCs yet, but since the feature of creating an account at Adobe, I believe synchronization should be possible. Other features seem quite interesting, such as the ability to lend books. For now, the functionality of marking the last point of reading and the size of just 19Mb x 195Mb of Acrobat Reader for Mac are quite interesting.