Adobe announces Digital Publishing platform

Adobe announced today a new Digital Publishing Platform targeting particularly mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. The aim of this platform is to enable print publishers to create digital versions of their magazines to life. For that Adobe is creating its new Digital Publishing platform in integration with Adobe Creative Suite 5, as one would expect.

The iPad version of Wired magazine had recently been release on the App Store with success. Adobe provided the structure to made that possible and announced that the publishing technology used in Wired for iPad should be available on their Adobe Labs site, later this year (they said Summer before). There is still a road to travel as Wired magazine for iPad shows with its size on disk — a 500MB file is not an optimal solution for transfer to a mobile device.

There’s an obvious gap in digital publishing and Adobe with its Creative tools seems to be a good fit for it. A few weeks ago I suggested that Digital Magazine Publishing would be a great business for Adobe. Though similar, the path I suggested isn’t exactly what they are doing, although as they say in the Digital Publishing Platform FAQ:

Adobe currently supports HTML5 and will continue to do so as the technology matures, including support for all future HTML5 standards. We believe that HTML5 is one of the technologies our customers will blend with others to deliver compelling reading experiences.

(…)

For example, designers will be able to take advantage of the following to create high-performance, highly interactive content:

• Prebuilt interactive overlays (audio, video, 360, slide show, pan and zoom, and hyperlink, with more expected in the future) as shown in the WIRED Reader example
• Adobe InDesign CS5 rich interactive document features
• HTML5 (across all mobile device platforms)
• Authoring tools built on Flash technology (for platforms other than iPhone OS)

It was bound to happen. Now let’s hope for more info other then marketing text and get a chance to know how this platform really works.

More info here (video) and Adobe’s Digital Publishing Platform FAQ here.