When comparing Adobe Digital Editions vs Sumatra PDF, the Slant community recommends Sumatra PDF for most people. In the question“What is the best Windows eBook reader?” Sumatra PDF is ranked 2nd while Adobe Digital Editions is ranked 5th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Well-designed library management
All books are automatically divided in categories such as "not read", "borrowed", "purchased", "recently read", and "recently added" and additional categories can be added manually. They can be sorted by various criteria including "title", "author", "publisher", "date of addition", and "number of pages". Great for managing large quantities of books.
Pro Can be used with a variety of screen readers
ADE supports JAWS, Window-eyes, NVDA and Voiceover.
Pro Built-in annotation tools
You can highlight and leave notes in the app.
Pro Starts quickly
Pro Free and open source
Sumatra is available for free, licensed under GPL with source code available on GitHub.
Pro Low resource usage
Pro Does not have heavy editor features
Annotations and other heavy features are just not needed in reader.
Pro Extensive keyboard shortcuts
Pro Elegant interface
Pro Portable
The application consists of a single file that can be run without installation. You can put it on an external device, such as an usb thumb stick and run it on any Windows machine from the thumb stick.
Pro Multilingual
It's available in 69 languages.
Cons
Con Full of bugs. No longer supported
Con No support for Linux
Doesn't have a Linux version.
Con Can't edit metadata
Lacks a built-in metadata editor.
Con Windows only
Con Lacking in features
Sumatra aims for simplicity at the expense of functionality. For example, there's no way to annotate PDFs or edit them.
Con Fonts are not smooth enough
Not as smooth as e.g. Adobe Reader. No anti-aliasing
Con Cannot crop empty fields
Just got used to this killing feature on Goodreader on Mac.