Aussies pay more for Adobe Acrobat 9

update Australians can expect to pay close to forty percent more than their US counterparts for a copy Adobe Acrobat 9. However, Aussies are getting a better deal than their UK counterparts, who can expect to pay twice as much.

The recently released Acrobat 9 is available in Australia for AU$995 or for over AU$200 less — US$699 — in the US.

The pricing difference occurs across the range, with Acrobat Pro costing US$449 in the US, but sells in Australia for AU$639. Acrobat Standard sells in the US for US$299, but sells for AU$425. All versions of the software are currently available.

An Adobe spokesperson said: "When setting our store price we analyse the market and set our pricing accordingly... For these reasons generally, we lean towards slightly higher pricing on our local Adobe store than what you may see on our US site."

Adobe said that its resellers, Ingram Micro, Express Data and Scholastic would offer lower prices. According to the company, customers outside the US will not be able to buy from the US site.

According to Adobe, Acrobat 9 now includes native support for the company's Flash technology, so web pages with multimedia content can be converted into PDF documents. Multimedia embedded in PDFs will be possible with version 9 of Adobe's free Reader application, expected to appear at the start of July.

The Acrobat suite also enables users to "co-navigate" a PDF document in real-time using Adobe's hosted services, and allows several media types to be combined into one 'PDF portfolio' — Adobe gives the example of charts, spreadsheets, images and video being combined into one PDF file.