Jeremy attended — and participated in — last week’s “Edit 2010” magazine publishing event in Warsaw, and includes a nice round-up of what was covered, especially on the Adobe digital tools front.
Pictured, an earlier issue of Gym Class Magazine that was on display as part of a magazine exhibition. Make sure to pick up the latest issue!
I was reading this piece at WWD on Adobe’s digital magazine initiative and the release of the new iPad edition of Martha Stewart Living (which uses the Adobe platform), and found this bit near the end rather interesting:
Adobe is now moving on to National Geographic.
When I reviewed the current National Geographic iPad app a while back — which is nothing more than a wrapper for its Zinio edition — I mentioned how disappointed I was that a magazine of that stature wouldn’t try to release something a bit more ambitious. Sounds like we’re going to get something along the lines of Wired after all.
So we’ve known for a while that Adobe would be releasing the tools they created for use in the Wired and New Yorker iPad apps, and now we finally have a few more details on what to expect. First thing, it’s going to be pricey. There are going to be two editions, Professional and Enterprise, and the latter is “expected” to be $700 per month, and add to that a per-issue fee.
Definitely not the kind of news I wanted to hear, hoping that they were going to be offering tools that would make sense for indie publishers. Let’s first wait and see what the pricing on the Professional edition will be though.
You can read the full press release here for more details on what the suite will have to offer. (via @magculture)
The Adobe editing tools used by Conde Nast for their Wired and New Yorker apps get a lot of attention — often in conjunction with the resulting bloated file size they produce — but let us not forget that there are other iPad magazine editing tools out there (working within InDesign), with WoodWing probably being Adobe’s main competitor. Its Digital Magazine Tools are behind quite a few big titles, including Time, Sports Illustrated, People, and Fortune. This video gives you a peak at the latest additions to their software, and there’s plenty more to see in this YouTube channel.
All these links come from this MagCulture post by Jeremy, which includes a few more iPad magazine links of interest.
As you can probably tell from the amount of times I mention it, despite its flaws, I do quite like the iPad edition of Wired, and so I’ve been rather happy to learn that Wired UK will also be introducing an iPad edition — it kicks off with the December issue, with a release on November 4. It’s still not clear to me how much of the content in the UK edition is original (and how much comes from the US edition), but I believe it’s fairly different, and so it looks like we’ll soon have access to two issues of the magazine every month.
I also can’t wait to see what the editors and designers of the UK edition will end up doing in terms of presentation. The FAQ they recently put out mentions that they are using the same Adobe-produced tools that the US edition uses, so should we expect pretty much the same thing, or are we going to get some new ideas on what a magazines on the iPad can look like. I’m of course hoping for the latter.