November 11, 2009

Adobe Expanding Investment in Digital Publishing

As part of a restructuring announced yesterday, Adobe has made the decision to expand its investment in digital publishing, creating a new organization focused on delivering products to increase digital revenue opportunities for book, newspaper and magazine publishers. This organization will combine the efforts of Adobe's eBook business responsible for the Adobe Reader Mobile SDK, Adobe Content Server, Adobe Digital Editions, and PDF and EPUB authoring support in Adobe InDesign with Adobe's digital newspaper and magazine efforts responsible for, among other products, the collaboration with the New York Times to create the AIR-based Times Reader 2.0.

The decision to increase investment in this area underscores the importance that Adobe has always given to digital publishing as well as the bright future it sees in helping publishers to deliver compelling digital publications that support a variety of business models: subscription, advertising, retail and other emerging models. We are particularly excited about what we have in store for 2010. We plan to further our reach to emerging mobile reading platforms to allow readers to read anywhere, on any device. With Adobe's acquisition of Omniture, we will help publishers measure and understand how their readership interacts with and uses their content. But, most of all, we will continue to deliver products that make digital books, newspapers and magazines a terrific experience for readers.

We look forward to working with our existing customers and business partners and welcome any new inquiries as we continue our progress in digital publishing.

September 17, 2009

InDesign to Kindle conversion guide

Today, we're posting a how-to guide that explains how to convert eBooks authored using Adobe InDesign for compatibility with the Amazon Kindle and the Kindle Store. Because Amazon uses their proprietary AZW format, the Kindle doesn't natively support the open EPUB standard. However, with a bit of open source software, it's fairly easy to convert the EPUB files exported with InDesign into the Amazon-compatible MOBI format.

Converting InDesign documents for Kindle compatibility requires the following steps:

1. Export InDesign document to EPUB
2. Convert EPUB to Amazon-compatible MOBI format
3. Preview on Kindle device (optional)
4. Upload to Amazon store

For complete details, check out the Adobe InDesign to Amazon Kindle Store white paper

May 11, 2009

EPUB generation library written in Java

It's come to my attention that I didn't really give EPUBGen a proper introduction, and so there's been some confusion about the project.

EPUBGen project

EPUBGen is a Java library that demonstrates EPUB generation from a variety of document formats, and which may be a useful starting point or reference code for other EPUB generation needs. That is to say, it's an effort to promote the development of a variety of tools and workflows.

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Font obfuscation code, available for review

I realize this blog might have a diverse readership so I'll warn those of you who aren't developers, that this particular blog post probably isn't for you. Unless you find reading Java code interesting, you can probably skip this article. I've implemented the IDPF font obfuscation algorithm which is recommended here. The font obfuscation code can be found in the EPUBGen project, and so you can take and review, and use the code. In this article, I'm going to highlight just the portions of that project that are related to embedding and obfuscating the font information. (The project also has font subsetting and other features which I will not cover.)

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May 8, 2009

InDesign 6.0.2 and EPUB export

There's a new update to InDesign CS4. Version 6.0.2. The update fixes lots of other stuff, so you may want to look at the release notes to see what's fixed that is not related to the EPUB export, I'm only going to talk about the EPUB plug-in.

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