Every day there is some new technology that hits the street and pundits say it is the next “killer” app. However, the street is littered with offerings that just did not work or are no longer supported. At the same time, there are existing applications that remain as bedrocks.
One of the best examples of a bedrock application that continues to be a standard even when everyone aims at it is Adobe Acrobat. For over two decades, it has been the standard for “Portable Document Format”. The focus of its offering is on the business marketplace. Adobe continues to enhance the product with new features and functions. there was a brief foray into the consumer market, but its structure was geared toward text and graphics. In the consumer market, some offerings focused on “text” only readers, Kindle and Amazon. At the same time, other vendors try to nip away at its business market.
Adobe Acrobat DC is a globally recognized standard for reliably viewing, printing and commenting on PDF documents. It holds an impressive market share of approximately 40.31% in the category of PDF Readers and Editor. A supporting product Adobe Acrobat Pro adds another 12.88% for a total of 53.19%.
A few years Adobe tried to enter the consumer and cloud market with Adobe Central. The focus was to create a nitch for “electronic forms” and the cloud. It was geared towards the middle market and entered with a huge promotional process.
Unfortunately, it did not take hold and customers who opted into its use were left to hold the bag with no path forward for all of the investments in the design, development, and deployment.
At that point, Adobe focused on improving its core PDF offerings and adding cloud support for its customer base.
eBook Formats - Consumer Focused
In the consumer market, an “open-source” ebook was designed for books to be read with Kindle-type devices, which are not graphic-friendly. It has a great market share but has not been able to tap into the “business” marketplace because of its graphic and “color” limitations.
The following are published facts about eBooks.
The eBooks market worldwide is expected to generate a revenue of US$14.61bn by 2024.
This projection indicates an annual growth rate of 1.62%, resulting in a projected market volume of US$15.33bn by 2027.
It is predicted that the number of readers in the eBooks market will reach 1.4bn users by 2030.
The user penetration rate is estimated to be 13.3% in 2024 and is expected to increase to 14.1% by 2030.
The average revenue per user (ARPU) is projected to be US$14.18.
In terms of global comparison, in the United States is expected to generate the highest revenue, reaching US$5,336m in 2024.
In the worldwide eBooks market, the United States dominates with its vast consumer base and strong digital infrastructure.
Granted it is a large market and one that the PDF format does not quite fit. With business focused on both text and graphics for published documents and the revenue per user less than $15, Adobe wisely has opted out of the market segment.
WinZip entry into the PDF Space
The core element of the product is the ability to compress and uncompress a file to reduce storage requirements and transmission time. WinZip was first released in the spring of 1991 as a Graphical User Interface (GUI) front-end for PKZIP. The most recent release WinZip of 76.6 Pro - 64-bit tried to integrate PDF and cloud into the core product and failed in the execution of that task.
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