Posted on 25 April 2011 • 62 comments
It’s Easter Monday (a public holiday here in the UK) and I’m sitting outside in the garden, enjoying some much-needed downtime. I’ve spent he last half hour or so casually flicking through the latest issue of MacUser magazine, which has a large feature about Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite, the InDesign add-on for (the soon-to-be-released) CS5.5 that facilitates the creation of iPad magazines. Although I’ve yet to make to make up my mind about this sort of digital publishing, it looked like an interesting article and I decided to take a closer look. And then I read something that shocked me:
Adobe’s pricing model
Perhaps it’s foolish of me to be surprised by the extortionate software prices set by Adobe — it’s certainly their usual practice — but the shocking aspect is that Adobe are going to charge recurring fees on top of the standard software price. That’s totally understandable, since releasing an iPad magazine incurs a hosting overhead (primarily for in-app purchasing), but these fees are astronomical. Here are some of the figures quoted by MacUser, based on current approximate currency conversions:
- £3636 per year (fixed) for the ‘Platform Fee’ required for in-app purchasing.
- £3367 per year (minimum) for the’Distribution Service Fee’, which is effectively a downpayment for the £0.16 per issue Adobe will charge, starting at the minimum commitment level of 25,000 downloads (even if you hit nowhere near that amount).
That equates to £7003 per year as a minimum spend — irrespective of how many copies you sell, or how regularly you publish — and that’s on top of the one-off charge for the new 5.5 version of InDesign: £94 as an individual upgrade from CS5, £238 for a suite upgrade from CS5, and considerably more if, like me, you’re upgrading from CS4: £190 for InDesign on its own and £619 for the whole suite. Brand new, InDesign CS5.5 costs £714 and the suite costs £1810. That’s what you’ll be paying to Adobe. On top of that, there’s the 30% per-download charge publishers are required to pay to Apple (which, for the record, I regard as fair, especially as it’s considerably lower than what physical shops take for stocking your magazine).
To put that into perspective, if we released an iPad version of 8 Faces and charged £4 per issue, we would have to sell around 2700 downloads before we broke even, and that doesn’t even take into consideration the time needed to actually create the app, which I’d put at around three weeks.
These fees may be a drop in the ocean for large publishing houses, but for those of us who publish on a more independent scale, we’re effectively being priced out of the market. It’s certianly possible to make a profit with Adobe’s model, but it requires a huge audience to make that investment a viable one. If you doubted the worth of producing an iPad magazine due to the extra production time involved, then you have even more reason for concern in the wake of this news from Adobe.
However, the biggest problem I have with this model is not necessarily the actual costs; it’s the fact that Adobe are asking for even more of our money. Not content with charging outrageous prices for bloated, processor-intensive, crash-happy software, they want to make the publishing industry exclusive once again and ignore the last 25 years that fostered such innovation. As MacUser editor Adam Banks said in his introduction to the issue:
That was desktop publishing. It was fun, it was creative, it was ground-breakingly democratic, and I hope you enjoyed it, because it’s over.
~ Adam Banks, editor of MacUser magazine
Back to the web, then
One of the key points of criticism surrounding iPad magazines — or, in fact, dedicated apps in general — has been that they are far from ideal solutions, especially compared to web apps that run in the browser. Is there any point in creating a dedicated app that’s limited to one kind of platform, doesn’t utilise conventions such as copy-and-paste, and is closed rather than extensible? In many ways, digital magazine apps go against much of what we’ve learned on the web in the last few years, and Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite seems to go against that and the desktop publishing revolution. They might do well in appealing to big players in the industry, but if we’ve learned anything from the combined revolutions of desktop publishing and web-based publishing, it’s that everyone has the potential to be a content creator. Right now, in 2011, the age of orbital content, that could not be more true. And Adobe could not be more wrong.
It is not difficult to replicate the functionality of these iPad magazines in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, especially with the very heathy adoption of HTML5 and CSS3 that we have in the current stable of browsers. And in doing so we create not only equal experiences, but superior experiences. So let’d do it!
One of three things is about to happen
The first, least likely, and least desirable outcome is that everyone adopts Adobe’s new tools and we churn out a load of proprietary iPad magazines.
The second, slightly more desirable outcome is that Adobe’s rivals steal the show with better and cheaper solutions. The MacUser article I referred to above compares Adobe’s model with Quark’s equivalent, and Quark wins by a long shot in terms of price. Could Quark make a bold return and steal InDesign’s crown? What of the other competitors? The time is ripe for smaller developers to step up and offer something comparable (perhaps even open source) to blow Adobe out of the water.
The third and undoubtedly most favourable outcome would be that we all collectively realise that making proprietary iPad magazines makes about as much sense as all-Flash websites, and we start creating some fantastic in-browser experiences that offer far more to the end user (on any device) than Adobe’s solution ever could.
Option number three is inevitable; it’s just a matter of us deciding whether to wait for Adobe’s method to slowly die out, or just start doing cool shit now.
62 comments
David
25 April 2011 @ 08:01PM #
That’s seriously ridiculous, especially with the coming onslaught of Android-based tablets. The iPad is a great device but it’s seems like it’s being viewed as something that should be the only option. It may have a head start, but that’s no reason to limit publishers to the one platform.
It seems like Adobe is on the path towards making the same mistakes Quark made and is taking we users for granted.
Dave
25 April 2011 @ 08:11PM #
We are working on some Ipad / Phone versions of magazines at work and have been using the beta of Adobe’s indesign to export to the ipad platform. We recently switched and are now working on developing a CSS – html5 version and are looking at http://cssgrid.net and other ways of doing it. The pricing is very expensive for what they are offering, our version may not be as super funky, but it will work on Iphone, Android and the Ipad. I hope some smaller company takes the challenge on and writes something similar at a reduced price, need to have some good competition out there. I think Adobe’s pricing is expensive in general, but since they acquired Macromedia they seem to have the marketplace.
David Turner
25 April 2011 @ 08:19PM #
As someone who has pretty much always been focused on the web elements of design I’ve honestly not seen any reason to create a device specific app for anything I’ve considered creating. There are certainly good reasons to in some cases, but to provide a magazine to a user? I don’t think that’s a good fit.
Adobe, with their pricing structure, provide yet another reason to consider alternatives. As you cover in your options, that of going with HTML/CSS/JS to produce awesome stuff that works anywhere the web does seems like the obvious choice to me. Posts like your own show that I’m not alone in this.
Adobe really do seem to want to get as much money as they can from customers, and in doing so they will alienate many companies that aren’t big enough for these services to be an “instant purchase”. The same companies that typically produce really innovative and unique ways of doing things. It will be REALLY interesting to see what kind of stuff they come up with.
Brian
25 April 2011 @ 08:24PM #
This is awesome Elliot! I only wish that a team of designer / developers would rise up to the challenge to de-throne Adobe in all of the various arenas where they hold sway… not just InDesign. Cheers bro!
Ryan
25 April 2011 @ 08:24PM #
I think this is a great opportunity for these companies to start blogs rather than magazines. One-off issues of content in an iPad app is ridiculous. I’d also like to point out that as a user, seeing an ad on a website is no big deal, but in an iPad app it makes me cringe. So depending on how much they’re charging for the app, and then the recurring fee, they could make more by using ads on a website.
Interesting concept, and maybe the push everyone needs is a web platform that acts like a blog, but presents it’s content as something like a magazine concept.
Kevin Haggerty
25 April 2011 @ 08:42PM #
WIth modern CSS techniques, especially animations, Adobe’s desktop software offerings are no longer necessary for getting content out there. The web and hypertext have served us well, no need to go from a page layout application to exported flat page images in a huge crazy xml document…
I’ll step up to the challenge! I’m building a screen layout app that works on iPad to both author and view content. Pure HTML/CSS/Javascript stack on the front end, browser based so you are designing in the medium you are presenting in.
It’s primarily a CSS3 Visual Animation tool, currently but works great for laying out static content. I’ve been thinking of what this tool means for designers and publishes a lot, and envision it as a general purpose web publishing tool, designed around “screens” rather than “pages”.
My app will also cost you, but by a factor of 10-20 less than adobe seems content to extort from publishers…
http://edit-room.com has a live development preview that anyone can test drive.
Niels Muller Larsen
25 April 2011 @ 09:13PM #
Let’s bypass Adobe and dó cool shit now!
Van
25 April 2011 @ 10:24PM #
I am totally shocked at Adobe. Bypassing them is very simple for so many talented people..I imagine there is some deeper gain by using them, there has to be. Or am I just a optimistic capitalistic boob?
Simbul
25 April 2011 @ 11:52PM #
It’d be definitely healthy if more people could use HTML, CSS and JS for their digital publications. They’re powerful, well known standards: probably more than enough for the needs of most small publishers.
In fact, I have been working with some friends on Baker, an open source framework to bring HTML publishing on the iPad. The response has been amazing so far and by reading your post I kinda see why :D
In case you’re interested, you can find all the details at http://bakerframework.com/
Denham
25 April 2011 @ 11:53PM #
Last year at Google’s I/O conference one of the managers of Sports Illustrated gave a presentation about delivering their magazine through new HTML5/CSS3/JS techniques.
I never found out what became of it, but I remember there was a demo of it on the Chrome store and they planned on selling it there.
Glen
25 April 2011 @ 11:58PM #
I view this instead as a positive thing; businesses large and small will, if they haven’t already, may see the massive benefits of using plain old HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript.
Perhaps it’ll even spawn more tutorials and projects (eg: JS widgets) geared towards the desktop publishing crowd making the move to publishing in a digital format.
Joachim Reinhold
26 April 2011 @ 01:09AM #
i love eating french snails. in a good restaurant I am charged about 10-20 Euro. But would I go thete if on top of that I would have to pay 5 Euro cover charge (incl. garlic butter, bread and a decorative flower) plus a fee using the restaurants fork even if i can bring my own? A digesting fee although the snails are inside my bidy once digestion starts? Plus hypothetical toilet fee if I am not quick enough and need the restaurant’s restroom services before leaving the venue?
Well, let Adobe charge whatever they want, I can eat elsewhere. As a starter I open my iMac, open iWorks / Pages or on a different level of taste, I open iLife / iWeb. I create a basic let-out, do some manual correction, fireup the free main course of the bakerframework and … voilà, dinner is served with a wonderful sweet app cooked wirh all my kitchen had in store. And if some publishers are slow as snails they might gwt eaten away by modern technology, YES, they are right, DTP with their products was yesterday BUT doing ARTS with what the Bakerframework can do OR will do is of Today…
Paul
26 April 2011 @ 09:29AM #
The best magazine reading experience I’ve had on the iPad is an issue of Scientific American Mind I bought in PDF format, using Good Reader to read it. So, you could simply publish your magazine as a PDF with a viewer. I’m not sure if this applies to most people, but I can do without all the flashy bells and whistles offered by other iPad magazines (e.g. Wired). Just show me the content.
Nick Creed
26 April 2011 @ 12:03PM #
We have just upgraded our old Adobe CS3 to CS5 and the cost of that in itself was eye watering. To take on Abobe ipad tools too will break the budget! Adobe do seem stuck in their turn of century pricing models.
However smaller publishing companies do need ‘out the box solutions’. They can’t always afford to create their own solutions or even work with frameworks that still need technical knowledge. And to then find solutions across android and other OS can be a major challenge.
Hopefully with the growth of this sector it will ensure there are future solutions that are low cost.
John Allsopp
26 April 2011 @ 12:28PM #
Like appstores, folks rush to ebooks, in the vein hope that last century’s business models can be saved if we try hard enough to pretend an ebook is really a book.
Mean while, the web continues to change everything.
By the way, don’t exonerate Apple – there is no fairness in business, only what rent you can extract with market power.
That 30% will be 2% within a decade -perhaps a fraction of that, as the friction of commerce and distribution is continually eroded.
Lot’s of folks meanwhile really better have a good hard look at their business models – apple included – the day;s of high priced software licenses are over. So too soon will be exorbitant Appstore rents.
john
will
26 April 2011 @ 12:36PM #
So hold up Adobe’s pricing structure means no small companies will buy it, but surely for the really big players they are hiring designers to design solely for the iPad. Well how about hiring 2 fewer designers and 2 more coders to do it in HTML/CSS? Why isn’t that done? It is already right? (Look at NYT, Guardian etc..) So really the only market Adobe’s tools are focusing on isn’t the really big players – its the middle ground. Which there are less and less of…
Tom
26 April 2011 @ 02:32PM #
Ouch. Maths = head hurts in more ways than expected.
I’ve seen some examples of what this InDesign tool is churning out in terms of iPad apps and they’re quite frankly awful. They’re on par to flash sites mimicking normal standards based layouts – they can look the part, but it’s clunky, slow and very prone to crashes.
(Hmm.. comparing it to flash is very relevant it seems.)
Basically these tools create sub-par products.
Great write up :)
Keith Martin
26 April 2011 @ 11:32AM #
Glad you found it interesting. It is worth noting that the fees that all these iPad publishing solutions charge are there to cover the requirements Apple lays down for in-app purchasing. All magazine apps are shells that allow users to buy issues within the app framework, using in-app purchasing. This requires back-end server management – and that’s what the fees are for. Any similar solution where there’s a shell app and issues bought within that MUST deal with the same back-end requirement. So there is a significant cost involved whatever technology you use to build your digital magazines.
I’m not arguing that the high-level fees we’re seeing are good, just that claims that the full iPad magazine publishing scenario can be achieved cheaply by switching to HTML/CSS/etc are missing a fundamental point.
What’s interesting is that one company charges one price for this service while another charges something quite radically different. There’s certainly some settling down and shaking out to be done here! I think some of the driving force behind Adobe’s recent pricing decisions comes from the famine/feast income situation the company has built by packaging everything into monolithic suites. But that’s a discussion for another time.
Keith
Frank De Graeve
26 April 2011 @ 02:25PM #
As webbies we all dream of an HTML5 and CSS 3 world were everything is possible and no funny expensive looking reader-app is needed. Agreed. But let’s not forget we’re webbies. We know code. We learned to code. Coding and good attractive designs are two different beasts. I see it all the time. Give a webdeveloper a nice Photoshop mockup and you’ll get a great site. Give him nothing and you’ll get a functional though ugly site. There are a couple who can pull it of, but still.
As for now, the only tool to create graphically challenging things is the Adobe toolset (heck, and Quark, OK). It’s visual. I’d love too see the very same toolset churn out the same designs, but with the same functionality (slideshows, buttons, movies,…) as the ADP toolset allows for right now. I’d hate it if graphic designers would need to be coders too. There’s only so much you can specialize in and I doubt it it can be both. I’d also hate it if you’d need 2 people (graphic designer and developer) to get publishing.
So perhaps it’s time for an extra player to enter the market. A player who doesn’t focus on ‘print’ but does leverage the graphic tools needed, to create ‘web content’.
I often think about what Apple does with their iAdDeveloper tools. Agreed, it’s heavily template based, but it allows for some nifty stuff, without needing to be a developer. Many are trying, so I guess it’s a matter of time.
Stephane Beladaci
26 April 2011 @ 04:04PM #
And how much of that money goes to Apple, did you figure that out? Apple recently imposed a 30% tax on all money making being app purchase, in-app purchases and subscriptions, you are not talking about that or did I miss it?
Also, we have to demand Flash in the browser on iOS, that will allow to conduct business outside of native apps taxed by platforms (Apple is champion at that!).
Enough of Apple’s lies, I’ve had it! Yesterdy I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FTC in order to get a copy of Adobe’s complaint against Apple over Flash last year. Journalists and lawyers apparently want proof of bad intend regarding Apple’s war on Flash, I am convinced of Apple’s bad faith and believe those documents might contain proofs so let’s do this.
More info and copy of my request here:
http://applesucks.squarespace.com/blog/apple-banned-me-from-forums-scared-of-adobe-flash-on-ipad-an.html
Luke Jones
26 April 2011 @ 04:33PM #
It sucks so much that we have to use Adobe’s software to design. Regardless of how much moaning happens, Adobe are still creating the most powerful design applications available, until someone else comes along they can charge what they want and make money from it.
@Stephane – you’ve just got it in for Apple, there’s absolutely no reason to go onto a site called “applesucks”, it’s a sensationalist heap of rubbish. Your website contains your subjective ideas and not facts, stop selling it as such.
David
26 April 2011 @ 04:44PM #
I hope this will just encourage people further away from producing iPad magazines as apps. It seems such a backward step anyway, who wants the 21st Century equivalent of CD-ROMs?
There are a lot of exciting products out there that will allow people to create products that can be published via the browser — see for instance Treesaver (treesaver.net), Issuu and Bibliotype (craigmod.com/bibliotype). For the most part free and based on standards and responsive design. So one way forward is to pay loads of cash to produce an in-app experience on one platform, the other to use low-cost open-source publishing frameworks that will work across a number of platforms and devices. Hmm.
Andy
26 April 2011 @ 04:48PM #
Absolutely spot on Elliot – I have no interest whatsoever in creating prohibitively expensive iPad only apps, just like I have no interest in making Flash websites (and no interest in making native apps either) – have we learnt nothing from the past 5 years move towards open web standards?
Thankfully, I know we have learnt a lot, which is why, like you, I think we’ll see the majority of people opt for HTML5 web apps.
Unlike you, I do feel Apples 30% cut on content that is neither produced, hosted nor distributed by them is however excessively greedy, but a move towards write once, publish everywhere web apps also side steps that particular hurdle.
Owen van Dijk
26 April 2011 @ 04:57PM #
Those are serious prices, true, but it translates to ~£590 per month. If you’re a regular publisher of tablet mags, I’d say those are reasonable costs for a distribution and payment channel. On the other end of the spectrum, there are solutions from Woodwing (large ebook publishing software company) costing over € 10K….ouch
Matthew Fabb
26 April 2011 @ 05:16PM #
Note, I agree that Adobe’s pricing is absolutely crazy.
That said, Adobe’s digital solution will be supporting Android tablets & RIM’s PlayBook. I wouldn’t be surprised if Adobe was also working on targeting WebOS for HP’s tablet.
Also one advantage of these types of magazines, is downloading all the content at once and being able to view the whole magazine and video clips while offline. However, others have complained about the large up front downloads and how much room they take up. Different people like different solutions better.
Also at the same time, Adobe is proposing extending CSS to allow it to handle more magazine like text for better browser based typography:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20041050-264.html
Ted T.
26 April 2011 @ 06:28PM #
So is Adobe finally started offering something decent, that allows the user to change the font size, or is it still producing a bunch of strung together JPEGs where the text is a picture, text size can’t be changed and the files are humongous? As a magazine reader, so far, I have refused to touch anything produced via Adobe’s tools with a barge pole.
An example of a traditional magazine, properly done, is The Economist. Text is resizable via pinch/zoom, the layout is very nice, performance is fast, and file sizes are relatively small even if you choose to download the the audio version of the entire magazine issue. You can archive as many past issues as wish.
The is absolutely no reason a multimedia heavy publication can’t be done in the style of The Economist — do the text and pictures the same way, and simply add video/audio to the layout where appropriate.
I will bet anything that Adobe or its tools were not involved in creating The Economist magazine app. If you can create something as good/fast as The Economist via HTML5 — go for it, more power to you! IF you can’t, stick to iOS/Cocoa Touch.
Scott G. Lewis
26 April 2011 @ 06:31PM #
Used to work in publishing, but years and years ago. This comment is solely as an iPad owner and a consumer. Zinio’s fine for me.
Andy
26 April 2011 @ 06:50PM #
1) create compelling web content (readable, stylish, ad free)
2) work out how to actually get people to pay for it
3) …um…
4) profit !
Were still stuck on 1, let alone cracking 2.
HTML + CSS is designed for exactly this job, it’s nigh on perfect. It just doesn’t have a working revenue generation model at the moment other than crappy, experience destroying ads
Mark Hernandez
26 April 2011 @ 06:53PM #
I’m not following this as closely as I should but perhaps one of you guys knows…
I thought that Apple changed direction away from supporting the super large publishers and turned towards its in-app 70/30 subscription model was because it realized there was a bigger untapped world out there in micropublishing, where anyone would be able to publish an electronic periodical, and that there might even be future Xcode-based tools to support that.
Was I just imagining that? I swear I read something because I repeated it to friends. Of course, as always, Google is no help trying to find such references, since I just get links to where I can buy Adobe’s software when I try to search for what I thought I had read.
Kristin Maling
26 April 2011 @ 06:37PM #
I have to agree with most of what is said in this article. I was involved in the prerelease testing of these tools and they’re amazing! I was able to do thing in hours/days intuitively in InDesign and the same things would have taken a lot longer in Xcode (not to mention requiring a programmer). We used these tools to create a free, digital edition of an art-photography project (see http://0to100project.com) and since it was done during the prerelease testing period, we didn’t have to pay the costs listed above. But, if we wanted to do the same thing now, the costs are just too prohibitive for smaller projects like this and it just wouldn’t have happened. And that’s a shame.
SlowX
26 April 2011 @ 07:13PM #
At first this really upset me. It’s a LOT of money!
But when I think about how digital projects are often created, where designers drive the bus and developers merely serve as wheels, then maybe this is good. Maybe it’ll force people to work together more and the print-happy InDesign crown may actually hear about digital possibilities beyond mimicking a page turn animation.
So who knows, maybe it will actually be good to get people to stop using print software for digital products…?
A cynic can dream, can’t he?
Gerd Kamp
26 April 2011 @ 07:12PM #
In the last months we developed a HTML5/CSS/Javascript based Newspaper/Magazine app framework. We started with 100% web technology but as expected we ended up doing an 80%HTML5 / 20% native solution, because there are some things that you just can’t do as a pure web app without sacrificing the user experience.
Content is still delivered as HTML5/JSON but sometimes you have to go native (since the early ages of mobile devices there are always the same reasons for doing so: slow(er) processors and limited memory. And while doing so we had to jump through a lot of hoops and pull quite a number of tricks out od our sleeves.
So HTML5 is the way to go but it is no easy way. At least if you wan to deliver a compelling app.
mike stone
26 April 2011 @ 07:23PM #
One minor quibble with your choice of words:
When you say Adobe is pricing small content creators out of the market, it carries the assumption that there are barriers to entry into that market, and that Adobe controls those barriers. I don’t agree with that. I don’t think the barriers are even high enough to justify a convenience fee on the level of what Adobe’s asking.
IMO, Adobe is hitching a ride on the dinosaurs for as long as they last.
Large organizations are notoriously slow to change their minds, and even slower to change their basic assumptions. Companies like that want standard processes where labor is fungible and personal accountability is as distant as possible. The risk-averse middle managers of large corporations will happily pay Adobe’s fees. It has nothing to do with actually delivering a product, or with the quality of the product produced. It’s just that paying Adobe offers better deniability than any other option.
Adobe is catering to organizations that want to approach a disruptive technology facing backwards. There are plenty of such organizations, and in business, you take money from people who want to give it to you. I don’t think this product is the future of publishing though. I see it as the exact opposite: a sedative to keep the late- and non-adapters comfortable as they go out of business.
alex kent
26 April 2011 @ 07:28PM #
hi.
as Andy points out, there is a ‘elephant in the room’ here.
- Dedicated iPad apps can be pay-for items.
- Websites cannot. (unless you count pay-walls, which haven’t really ‘taken off’)
also all you designers here, HTML/CSS/JS may be awesome, but it’s limited by a number of things.
fonts are still a massive problem, the hacks and tricks are getting better (webfonts, Cufon), but still if you must have all of your readers see your title in Helvetica Neue, you’re shit out of luck.
adobe can ride on this while big publishers throw money at trying to get people to ‘buy’ content (which we expect to get for free on the web) by packaging it up as an app.
alex.
Hamranhansenhansen
26 April 2011 @ 08:05PM #
The solution is you don’t try to use print publishing tools to make iOS apps.
In the same way that you first got onto the Web via your print tools, you can first get onto iPad via your Web tools. An iPad app can contain Web views where you can show your content in HTML5. That enables you to get onto iPad quickly and start serving their 25 million paying customers and the 1 million more they add every week (and that rate doubles every year) and it also keeps your content portable to the Web and to future native tablet platforms should another ever exist.
The iOS Developer Program is $99 per year and Apple showers you with dozens of tools, hundreds of instructional videos, and about a dozen instructional eBooks. These are the same tools that Tim Berners-Lee used to create the Web. A key feature is that they are accessible to people who are not primarily programmers.
There is also a 3rd party JavaScript framework called NimbleKit that enables you to access iOS API’s, which can also speed up development for people with Web publishing experience. It is a $99 one time fee. It also generates apps for iOS and Android phones.
So for $198 you can extend your Web workflow onto iOS and be in App Store and on iPad very quickly. There is no financial barrier to entry on iOS. Indies are welcome.
> making proprietary iPad magazines makes about as much sense as all-Flash websites
No, that is not true. I completely disagree.
An all-Flash website is just as broken and just as hard to monetize as the Web. Flash has just as many problems as the Web, some the same and some different, but just as many problems. An iPad app can be a dramatically better experience than the Web or Flash. You can make something that the user is not only willing to pay for, but is excited to pay for. And the monetization is built-in to iOS. The work you put in to make a better-than-Web experience is rewarded by better-than-Web money. Web to Flash is break even; Web to iOS is a net win. Further, the Web and iOS co-exist quite nicely. You don’t see a hole in a Web page saying “Get iOS!” You make an iOS app and you also make a Web app and you have both. That is possible with Flash as well, but rarely done.
The idea that the Web would be the One True Digital Publishing Platform is dead. Let it go. That idea was not killed by Apple making a much better experience on iOS, it was killed by W3C with XHTML, Microsoft with IE and Silverlight, Adobe with Flash, Google and Mozilla and Opera with WebM, and almost everyone involved for shipping broken browsers and content experiences that look like they were created via sphincter painting. The Web should have been doing the things that iOS is doing now about 5 years ago at the very latest. The silver lining is now that the Web has competition from another 1-click Internet app platform, the Web is improving more rapidly than before. It will track behind proprietary platforms as quickly or as slowly as the Web development community pushes it.
What’s more, I think it is incumbent upon content publishers to recognize that our readers or viewers or listeners don’t care about the technology, except to the extent that they don’t want to be forced to care about it. Instead, they care about being delighted or informed or entertained. They have had their fill of broken digital experiences and if we want them to reach for their wallets, we have to give them something that is worth paying for. With digital publishing, you make one copy and you duplicate it a million times, so we should be making a Rolls Royce, not a Yugo, and therefore make a million Rolls Royces. There has been way too much “well, you can’t make a Rolls Royce with IE” or other excuses. Well, then I will ship a Rolls Royce on iOS and delight your users and drink your milkshake. And I’ll ship a Yugo on the Web, too, and whether that ever becomes a Rolls Royce, again, is up to the Web development community. If they’d rather screw around with WebM, than Yugos it is.
Alistair Dabbs
26 April 2011 @ 08:08PM #
HTML and CSS? You mean those super-advanced technologies that can’t hyphenate, can’t kern, don’t support ligatures or glyph alternates, can’t reproduce colour reliably, can’t handle wraps predictably, won’t let you place column rules without half a day of manual programming, etc, etc, etc?
Here was I, hoping that tablets would revive beautiful magazines. Oh well, back to shitty looking websites, I guess.
Tim Green
26 April 2011 @ 08:43PM #
HTML5 and CSS would be great if browsers weren’t already so fragmented on tablets. You either have to insist on just the stock browsers or you have to waste an inordinate amount of time playing catch-up with new versions and new bugs. That’s also the main reason everyone wants an app-based framework to work in. They want to have one controlled platform that they can depend on, and at the moment a browser isn’t it.
That doesn’t change the fact that the Adobe pricing is simply batshit crazy, of course. ;-)
James Katt
26 April 2011 @ 08:44PM #
Thank God for the Baker EBook Framework. This is available for FREE for any number of books. Just do your books in HTML and CSS.
Looks like Adobe wants to price itself out of the EBook App market very quickly.
Dan
26 April 2011 @ 08:46PM #
Firstly whilst Adobe’s current tools are archaic, they are not the only solution and many magazine apps I’ve tried on iPad offer a better experience using either native or web tools wrapped in a shell app. Time magazine is 1 example that is streaming web style content. Someone mentioned Sports Illustrated, who I think use the same tools.
Secondly, many of you guys seem to be of the believe that it was Apple or Adobe who decided to put web content and magazines in native apps. This is untrue. They gave the developers the tools to do that if they wanted to, but Apple also support web apps and web standards. The developers did so because users wanted those apps, most likely due to experience with current web apps. Performance, offline functionality and monetization of the content (if you go web only ads are your only monetization, native iPad apps can use both just like print) are just a few things to consider when thinking about why this happened.
But let’s be clear, if there wasn’t demand from users for these native apps, they wouldn’t get made.
Gilles
26 April 2011 @ 08:47PM #
Check out Newspaper Direct (website address is exactly what you’d expect). Incredible product/service at a very reasonable price, and gets you pretty much exactly what you’re looking for. (Disclaimer: I’m not associated with the company in any way, though I did serve as a consultant to an organization looking into iPad publishing solutions and who were looking at ND as a service provider).
Former Adobe Customer
26 April 2011 @ 08:58PM #
“It seems like Adobe is on the path towards making the same mistakes Quark made and is taking we users for granted.”
Adobe started down that path a long time ago, friend. As an amateur photographer who has printed work for many professionals, I can tell you that many pros just aren’t updating Photoshop anymore. They’re keeping CS2 or CS3 running on an older machine for occasional use and screening of work files generated by shops like Aspen Creek or WCI, but paying Adobe’s insane upgrade prices is the last thing that self-supporting artists can afford right now.
So, that leaves Adobe with bigger shops to sell to, and it shows, just as this article illustrates. While I’m sure the folks in the trenches at Adobe are good people, I have to say that “Evangelists” like the haughty John Nack only push people away from Adobe’s arrogant attitude and slowly-deflating software quality. By refusing to admit mistakes (killing Frame on the Mac is a good one…they’d be selling thousands of licenses just in Santa Clara county if they’d kept that product going, but Adobe was betting the Mac would die off), Adobe is sending a clear signal that their products aren’t for individual artists – they are designed from the beginning for big publishing houses, corporate art departments, ad agencies, and the strictly professional market.
Screw ‘em. The G5 in the corner runs Photoshop CS2 very well, thanks – and it does everything that actual photographers need from Photoshop. Adobe’s iPad publishing ‘solution’ was designed for two things: marginalizing iPad publishing to the upper echelons of the industry and buying time for whatever overladen cart of crud they’ve got coming down the pipe. (See also SVG, Flash)
Hamranhansenhansen
26 April 2011 @ 08:59PM #
> HTML and CSS? You mean those super-advanced technologies that can’t hyphenate,
> can’t kern, [etc.]
If you don’t want to use HTML and CSS in your iPad app, then use PDF. Everything you see on an OS X device, whether iOS or Mac OS, is a PDF, because the window manager uses PDF. The sky is the limit in an iPad app, because you have access right down to the native C layer. If a great text experience is what you want, then there is nothing stopping you from creating it. But you don’t need to use Adobe’s iPad publishing platform to do it.
Lindy Talbot
26 April 2011 @ 10:28PM #
Adobe may come around,k unless this is an intentional marketing strategy. In the meantime
-or perhaps for the long haul- you might want to take a look at the Aquafadas solution. http://www.aquafadas.com/en/publishing/Enrique Lima
26 April 2011 @ 10:32PM #
Do you guys want to publish an iPad magazine at a reasonable cost right now? From either InDesign CS4 or CS5?
Try www.publish88.com It’s an affordable solution, with small to medium sized publishers in mind.
Also download the Obsessive Ideas iPad magazine to realize what it can be acomplished with this solution.
Options, there’s several options to Adobe’s plattform out there.
Christopher Drum
26 April 2011 @ 10:31PM #
I’m a graphic artist turned iOS developer who can’t help but feel a wee bit frustrated by the talk of making everything a generic web experience, regardless of the user’s choice of viewing option. Why is the community so quick to want to boil everything down to its lowest common “web standards” denominator and utterly ignore the target viewing platform’s strengths?
As a designer, picking the right paper, choosing the right inks, choosing the binding, etc were not aspects of the process we abhorred, but rather relished in crafting the final output. Designing toward the medium was part of the fun of the job, but that option is being stripped away by those who have so tightly coupled presentation and content in their minds that all talks of presenting content inevitably turn back to “web standards” as the start and end of the discussion.
Along those lines, I’m all for a markup language that codifies design intention, without dictating the implementation of such. From there, I will craft an experience that leverages my target platform’s strengths to get that onto screen. Maybe I’ll build a display platform, maybe I’ll build a custom app, maybe I’ll just write some CSS and throw it up in a web view, and maybe I’ll just render it all out as a self-contained PDF; but I may have very legitimate reasons to wish to leverage a specific piece of hardware and its capabilities. Maybe I NEED that 3D graphics processor to embed some cool fly-through of the human body. Maybe I WANT to do sound processing for a story that illustrates some scientific principle.
Someone in an earlier post likened the Adobe publishing platform to a rehash of the old days of early CD-ROM; the funny thing is, that’s exactly how I view the web-standards-or-bust crowd when it comes to presentation. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a webpage.
Garrett Cobarr
26 April 2011 @ 10:33PM #
I am a longterm customer of Adobe applications, 20 plus years for some. My manifestations have been graphic designer, image manipulator, post production artist, etc.
The most relevant guise to this article was as interactive PDF designer. I loved making interactive PDFs, nice coin and great clients and projects. I used InDesign for the initial content layout (Adobe even had me speak at their campus about that). I would output the PDF from InDesign then finish it off and write the JavaScript in Acrobat. There was a great community of PDF creators, totally cross platform and international, mostly centered in US, Britain and Switzerland. Everything went swimmingly along for about 5 years.
Towards the end of that period Adobe went through a serious corporate change with the new CEO Bruce Chizen, who replaced the founding CEO, John Warnock. It was at this time that the squeeze was put on the PDF development community.
At the time, something happened at Adobe that has never changed. They went from a more granular business model selling individual customers the production applications to a very keen interest in Fortune 500 clients and publishing platforms. This may have begun even earlier with their purchase of the institutional document tool, FrameMaker, in 1995.
Starting with version 6 of Acrobat many features that had been available in prior releases began to be moved to a platform license and by version 7 the noose was tightened with very significant abilities only available with the platform license. The cost was about $35,000 year. The cost and many other restrictions began to collapse the independent PDF design community. The final straw for me was receiving a letter from Adobe informing me of their desire to me move me from my role of design/producer and independent to a kind of middleware salesman. To receive that status I had to send them a list of my clients.
Their efforts to make a version of InDesign into a publishing platform for iPad is almost exactly like their attempts to do the same with Acrobat and PDFs, later they added InDesign that mix as well. It will go in almost the same direction. It is attractive to Adobe to follow this path because they do not want to deal with individual customers on a per purchase basis. They, like Microsoft, want all of us to pay in an ongoing fashion, subscriptions. It is increasingly difficult with mature applications to come up with new features that justify an upgrade and its price. Many of Adobe customers, like myself, often skip them and pick the next one. Adobe will be introducing a subscription option in version 5 of the Creative Suite, I believe that eventually they will force users into them.
On the surface it appears attractive to go with a Big Publishing platform. Individual users have costs associated with them that an OEM style business model does not. Big corporations have deep pockets. The problem arrises, as it did with their PDF hopes, that this market does not grow very fast or very much and eventually the tub is full. Art this point they are forced into raising the price but everyone is hopefully locked in, hopefully. They are confident of this strategy because they now have such an effective monopoly on creative production tools.
The strategy will fail or deliver results that will not satisfy them. The problem is the aforementioned size of the Big Publishing market. Another big problem is that would take such a small team to develop a compelling competitor that Adobe could quickly find themselves outside after they have made significant capital investments.
There are now so many a high quality journalists cut loose by the imploding news industry, plenty of iOS developers and other mavins of the creative ilk that we could see an explosion of media publishing platforms with excellent content.
Adobe is so locked into the traditional institutional mindset that they cannot see another way. A hybrid of the two business models would be a likely hit. Base price on a graduated and scaled resource demand and output. Start at the bottom with very low prices to free with discounts on the front end creative software. Big prices at the other end for the really big guys. But have an easily climbable ladder so that any who have a hit can grow and justify the cost.
This is great for Big Publishing because they have an every growing and improving talent pool to draw from. Adobe wins because they have a growing market and built in incentive for the small to buy in and spend the time in getting better, with the possibility of rewards in sight.
I have very little hope that Adobe will see it this way.
Joe Zeff
27 April 2011 @ 02:14AM #
Time and Sports Illustrated publish their iPad editions — and Android editions and Chrome editions — using WoodWing Enterprise and the company’s Digital Magazine Tools. That’s what we used to create “The Final Hours of Portal 2” app and others. It’s an InDesign-based solution that allows publishers to create content once and then repurpose it on many platforms. It’s coding-light, which allows publishers to focus on creativity rather than coding. Check it out… www.woodwing.com
michael
27 April 2011 @ 05:53AM #
Lots of talk here about HTML and CSS. The funny thing is that .epub for iPad and Nook, as well as Kindle’s .mobi formats aren’t much more than local websites. It’s undoubtedly slower to make e-books than using InDesign to make magazines, but isn’t that technically difficult. The e-books have a couple of simple XML files thrown in for metadata. The main pages are XHTML with a few extra tags. You can do some decent layout with CSS. The sites get zipped and have the .epub or .mobi extension substituted for .zip.
Conde Nast can pay Adobe’s rates. The rest of us can make ebooks that work on all platforms.
Michael Jones
26 April 2011 @ 11:54PM #
Answer to Solution 2:
http://www.magplus.com/
I’m in the beta program with adobe and started to try their solution but when they announced their pricing, especially the up front cost of buying 250,000 issues. I’ve decided to look elsewhere and found Magplus. been working with them for last 3 weeks and feel good about it. It’s from the publishers of Popular Science. $2,500 for first branded app and then $500 an issue after. Much more affordable, no per issue sold price and I like their interface better than Adobe. Adobe messed up, if they wanted a revolution the should have price it for it. They’re servicing just the big boys.
My 2 cents
Dan
27 April 2011 @ 09:20AM #
Seriously, Abobe have become a joke to me…
Their pricing is ridiculous, the customer service even more so!
…and their products seem to be losing touch with market trends (as you point out)
I’m going out of my way NOT to use their products and my life is far sweeter!
Chris K
27 April 2011 @ 04:24PM #
I agree that this pricing and control is something of a concern, but then I hear about things like Onswipe for Wordpress and am encouraged.
http://onswipe.com/wordpress/
Paul G
27 April 2011 @ 04:48PM #
Your article show have carried the title of : “How Adobe Is Killing The Digital Publishing Initiative.” Strange that, after all these years, I may reconsider QuarkXpress as a viable option, especially in light of it’s pricing model.
As an example, I’ve been teaching Adobe Acrobat Pro since version 5. The recent release of version X is closer to a Beta version than a proper, full release version. Especially in the Mac version. Major options not working, clumsy UI menus and poor interface design generally have substantially worsened a once productive piece of software.
Don
27 April 2011 @ 06:06PM #
I’m pretty sure that the pricing you’ve quoted is only for rentals, and not the full application. I think the full application can still be had for a one time fee, which would be substantially cheaper, but the monthly fee is for people who want to rent the applications for work.
Paul
27 April 2011 @ 07:30PM #
While this is clearly a (somewhat desperate) attempt by Adobe to try to get into the mobile publishing game, as their business model continues to be washed away by the digital tide, I don’t see the cause for all this outrage.
These tools, at least purportedly, allow a print publisher to turn its print magazine into an iPad app, even if it is of the cookie-cutter variety. It is not the only such tool, nor is it the most expensive. More importantly, have you actually looked at what it costs to develop an iPad app from scratch? Far more than what Adobe is charging, and possibly orders of magnitude more, depending on what you’re trying to do. Not to mention the logistics and planning required across an organization. This is the easy way, and for that, what Adobe is charging is a bargain, if you actually have a use for what they’re selling.
The larger question is whether dumping print content into an uninspired iPad version is actually a worthwhile endeavor. I doubt many print publishers will get much of a return on such an investment. But if they’re dead set on doing that, Adobe’s option sounds an awful lot cheaper and easier, and better integrated into their existing workflow, than many of the alternatives.
To address your point about independent publications: come on. You were already “priced out of the market” by the cost of developing an iPad app, period. Unless you choose to take that on in-house and have developers who can do so (note: developers are expensive); in which case, why are you complaining that Adobe is offering an alternative way to do it? There are also other, cheaper ways to create iPad apps, with third-party tools like Titanium, none of which are negated by Adobe’s tool. So look at your options and decide what it’s worth to you, but don’t berate Adobe for charging money for a product they surely spent a lot of money developing.
Jan Vantomme
27 April 2011 @ 08:08PM #
I’ve been using Adobe applications for 15 years now and I never liked their pricing strategy. Their applications have always been more expensive over here in Europe. The price for the Master Collection in Europe is twice as much as what I would pay in the US. The pricing for their digital publication platform us way too high. Small companies won’t be able to afford this to create publications for their clients.
I’ve researched some of the options to create digital publications for the iPad a while ago and found some interesting alternatives.
1. WoodWing. Company based in The Netherlands. They have a workflow for InDesign that allows you to publish to iPad and Android tablets. Unfortunately they don’t have pricing on their website, but from what I’ve heard from some people in the industry, they’re even more expensive than the new tools from Adobe.
2. RovingBird ePublisher. A company from Belgium. They made an InDesign CS5 plugin and a builder app to create an iPad app. Android will be supported later this year. Pricing starts at €1000 so this is a good option for small designstudios.
3. Xierpa. A web based publishing system made by Petr van Blokland. I saw a demo at one of his lectures. The system can be used to create print media and html5 based publications for the web. They use it mostly in-house. Don’t know what the licensing cost would be.
4. Baker. An html5 based eBook framework. It’s open-source but you’ll have to get your hands dirty and build everything with Xcode.
Alon
27 April 2011 @ 08:09PM #
There are some great comments, thoughts and links in this thread. We were also excited about Adobe’s DPS and created a simple, artistic photography zine for the iPad with the intent of keeping it free. Here is the iTunes link if anyone is curious: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/view-magazine/id422061173?mt=8
We will probably publish the second issue before the beta ends (and keep it free) but won’t be able to afford it later on. It’s too bad because the Adobe tools are great for designers and the integration with InDesign CS5 is pretty good, and I assume will be even better with version 5.5. In a way we (and I think many other designers too) tried showing Adobe that there is room for a lower fee/smaller magazine style publishing but I don’t know if that helped. I am going to check out some of the links people posted here and see if we can continue to publish our magazine on the iPad via other solutions.
Frank De Graeve
30 April 2011 @ 09:32PM #
I’m afraid I might have cause a great deal of ‘off-topic-ness’ by getting apple involved in my comments. I’d like to set this straight. I’m not saying Apple is the way to go. The discussion here is about ‘the tools’ to get something published on tablets (Android/iOS/…).
Ant a lot of the comments here are about the underlying technologies. It’s not about the technologies. It’s about the liberty of publishing. Adobe brings the liberty to a single man who can cough up one license of the creative suite and is ready to create stuff, even if he doesn’t have a lot of knowledge of the undrlying technology. We need something that does the same for publishing to tablets that doesn’t involve ‘coding’. Something that’s more simple that whatever SDK/framework/technology can offer. We need simple ‘tools’.
That’s the reason that I got the Apple iAd reference in there. I’m not a developer, and yet I can create quite smashing animations. The same thing goes for their ‘Dashcode’ App. With no coding knowledge whatsoever a creative mind can do cool stuff with that. Incidentally it’s Apple that I know that does stuff like this, so that’s why I mentioned them. But honestly I don’t care who creates the tools. I just hope someone does, but within a reasonable price range.
In an ideal world, Adobe would have just incorporated this toolset into Indesign, pack the viewer app in there and provide some automatic customisation to it and call it a day. That way, a single license for Adobe’s Indesign, some webhosting, and a developer account for Apple/Android, and I’d be all set as an independant creative sould to publish my work to tablets within a reasonable price range.
Keith Martin
01 May 2011 @ 05:08PM #
Remember, it is NOT possible to publish a digital periodical magazine on the App Store without having a robust back-end management service to handle the in-app fulfillment and customer tracking. Apple insists on this for any app that provides in-app purchasing – which means all magazines published as app shells with purchasable issues appearing inside. All the developers that offer magazine publishing solutions include this as part of the fee. But some charge a lot while others charge relatively little, and the ways the costs are presented isn’t the same from one product to another.
What practically nobody on the toolmaker side is talking about is the possibility to publish one-off things that don’t need any in-app purchasing. Some do mention this, but the costs are still major (frequently well into four figures) and there’s not much mention of whether it will still feel like a ‘magazine inside an app’ or a more self-contained publication.
We’re at the start of things in this field, which is what makes this all so exciting and frustrating. There’s a lot of shaking out to be done! You might find MacUser’s next digital publishing article of interest: it will look at a number of additional options to consider alongside Quark and Adobe’s own tools… and it will include a complete breakdown of costs for the five biggest iPad publishing solutions. It really is an eye-opener.
(Please excuse the plug… that issue will be in newsagents, Zinio and Pixelmags on May 13th, and with subscribers a couple of days sooner.)
Keith
(Technical Editor, MacUser magazine)
Michael Weijenberg
02 May 2011 @ 02:57PM #
Everybody lie down on the floor and keep calm.
First up, these prices for using the Digital Publishing Suite are only for “Enterprise” and “Professional” aka the lager companies who want to publish maybe 10+ titles a month. Adobe is still working on an “Agency” model in which you can choose to pay per issue or volume. As long as this is still not quite clear, no need for shouting (yet). Everybody now knows that the (big) money can be made in distribution, not in creation. As someone pointed out before, Adobe is just offering the tools in InDesign. What you do with them is your choice.
Second: What about creating an App in Objective C? Doing it Apple style? How many designers/DTP folks can do Objective C? What does it cost to get some whizfolks create an app for you?
Third: Sure you can go the other way, using Woodwings solution of Enterprise and ContentSystem + plugin for InDesign. What does that cost? Well a lot (around €10k to get you started)! (And you still have to use InDesign brought to you by Adobe.) No solution for small agencies of freelance designers.
Fourth: Yeah, let’s go back to Quark! Because we all know that company is practiclly giving it’s software away for free right? Yeah, right…
Fifth: More important thoughts: why do you (or your client) really want a digital magazine? And on which platform? We all know iPad is (until now) the biggest fish. Is a great designed and executed PDF not enough? Or get it on the web or another solution? No, we have to get on the iPad because everybody else is. Hmm that sounded familiar when Flash sites came out right?
Flash on iOS: Apple denied it because of 3 important reasons:
1: No “technological layers” between the iOS and the app
2: Flash drains batterylife (and yes they are right, just compare it with the other tablets runningtime)
3: Flash was not secure enough (and we all know it still isn’t)
But what also counts is that a lot of Flash content uses interfaces which haven’t been set/mad for touch devices. For example a lot of roll overs wouldn’t work. Who do you think would get the blame? Flash? Adobe? No Apple would have to deal with “angry” customers. When you buy an app, you can rely on the fact that it does what is say it will do and it’s contents is also according to the app.
Six: Apple is taking fee of 30%. Too much? Well consider this, it’s the best working cashregister in the world. Designed for customer ease. You’ll find out when you set up your own store. Some publishers are trying but keep struggling. Same goes for the other open platforms. Sure Androidmarket is free but since there’s no (or little) control regarding content or malware, how do you get your stuff “promoted”?
So let me get back to my first sentence:
Everybody lie down on the floor and keep calm. If nobody is “buying” the Adobe DPS model, it will be changed. Look at what they just introduced regarding softwaresubscription models.
Rainer
27 April 2011 @ 10:42PM #
Full disclosure: I know the Aquafadas people and work with them.
Check out their digital publishing solution at www.aquafadas.com/en/publishing/
What’s cool about it:
- AVE App Factory let’s you create apps without coding (they provide app templates)
- Their InDesign plugins let you create content for those apps through an easy-to-use user interface, again no coding or scripting
- Their Publisher Portal lets you manage your apps and content
The pricing model is quite different to any other solution I know, because there is no upfront investment and no revenue sharing. InDesign plugins are for free, as is App Factory. That means you can get started without paying anything. Only when you publish an app (=put it up to the App Store), and when you publish content into the app, you will be charged a one-time fee, which, in my opinion, is pretty moderate – it starts at €380 / $500 for a single book (gets less if you publish more).
The solution is very flexible, too, and supports books, magazines, newspapers, brochures, etc., as well as multiple book or periodical issues in one app, including in-app purchase.
They are in pre-release now, the final release will be within few weeks.
I Like Adobe
28 April 2011 @ 07:13AM #
Everyone relax. Tablets didn’t exist a year ago. Subscription options just started appearing three months ago. File size has dropped dramatically since the first magazine was produced. The tools have gotten progressively easier to use. My guess is publishing prices will drop as the technology matures… kind of like… well… every other technology in the world.
BTW – the $/issue fee is more than just a tariff. It covers analytics, administrative publishing tools, hosting, fulfillment, and a slew of other services. So… you pay for the device… you pay for the service to connect the device… you pay for authoring tools to build apps and publications for the device… you pay for services to distribute and analyze the apps on the device… and you charge customers who purchase your app enough to make a profit on all of the above. Is this really any different than… well… any other technology in the world?
AND YES – I LIKE ADOBE. The Digital Publishing Suite is the first technology to offer a simple tablet publishing process for people who don’t have a computer science degree and know how to write Objective C. It’s easy to use – and it’s amazing what people have created with it.
MT Bullington
08 May 2011 @ 03:09AM #
If a publication can not afford $500 per month (acording to what I am seeing on Adobe’s website) then it is not a real business. That is a tiny about to pay for publishing to a mass market. Miniscule. Let the onine diary writers stick to the blogs and socal networking.