Hooray! Acrobat 9 Ships

UK's The Register reports that Adobe Acrobat 9 was released Wednesday. As with other recent versions, the new Acrobat release is available in three versions, Standard, Pro, and Extended.

What's New in Acrobat 9 Standard

Acrobat 9 Standard ($299 full, $99 upgrade from Acrobat 6.x, 7.x, or 8.x) includes these new features:

• Easy fillable-form creation, form fill-in, and form tracking
• Software launches in half the time of Acrobat 8 (a much-needed improvement in my view)
• Include Adobe Flash-based audio and video inside PDF documents (can we expect more exciting e-Books now? I hope so!)
• Better OCR and scanner support to make it easier to turn paper into editable text
• Convert web pages, including pages with rich and interactive media, into PDF files
• Search multiple PDF files in the same folder
• Works with Acrobat.com website

For most users, though, Acrobat Standard just doesn't have enough goodies to justify the price. To find out why Acrobat Pro 9 will hit more users' "sweet spot," read page 2.