Adobe Digital Publishing

We blogged about the latest Digital Publishing Suite features a couple of weeks ago and Bob Bringhurst goes into step-by-step detail describing what’s new on the Digital Publishing Suite Help site. Now, Adobe Evangelist Colin Fleming, with his usual charm and eloquence, brings to life nested overlays, buttons, PDF pinch & zoom, relinking articles, and more in his latest video.

In this video, you’ll learn about (in order of appearance):

Design Improvements

• Nested Overlays
  • Overlays in a slideshow
  • Overlays in a scrolling frame
  • A few limitations
  • New Button Features
    • Buttons in slideshow states
    • Buttons for a slideshow in a scrolling frame
    • Buttons with multiple actions
    • PDF Zoom with interactivity on iOS
    • Relink article to source files

Viewer and Viewer Builder Updates

• Newsstand on iOS supports free subscriptions
• PDF Pinch/Zoom
  • Interactivity while zooming
  • iOS only, viewer dependent, article based
  • Self signed Adobe Content Viewer for iPad
    • Pro & Enterprise features for iOS
    • Get to new tools faster than Apple approval
    • Requires third party tool for USB preview, MacOS only

Folio Production Improvements

• Status notifications in dashboard
• Push improvements
• Manual push notifications
• 3rd party push

Want to learn more?

• Visit the Adobe Digital Publishing Help Site for tutorials
• Go to the Adobe Digital Publishing TV Channel for more how-to videos

How can you extend digital versions of your publication to your current print subscribers, maintain a relationship with your readers through your app, and provide them with special offers? The answer is direct entitlement. The Digital Publishing Suite team here at Adobe has developed materials to help you better understand direct entitlement, both what it is and how it works. In his video on direct entitlement, Colin Fleming outlines the challenges and the opportunities of extending digital subscriptions to existing print readers, describes the solution provided by Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, Enterprise Edition, and provides background on how to set up direct entitlement. The whitepaper on direct entitlement goes into detail on the strategic advantage of direct entitlement and provides background information on how it works.

Challenge: Offering Print Subscribers Convenient Access to Digital Issues 

A Comprehensive Subscriber Database Drives Business
As many readers of this blog realize, print subscriptions allow a publisher to develop a database of readers in order to collect information that aids in targeted upselling and cross selling to those readers. Subscriptions also offer publishers a consistent and renewable revenue stream across a 12 to 24 month period. To maintain a subscriber base, publishers go to great lengths to offer benefits to readers such as special editions and free gifts. Maintaining a database of loyal subscribers and knowing one’s reader demographics is essential to attracting advertising dollars and driving revenue through targeted marketing.

Business Limitations of the App Marketplaces
Publishers can use Digital Publishing Suite, Professional and Enterprise Editions, to sell subscriptions through leading application stores. However, selling subscriptions and single issues through app stores carries some limitations. On the business side, device stores only provide the publisher with an email address, and not extensive contact information, limiting the ability to both communicate with customers and build an accurate profile of its readership.  This makes it more difficult to market to the end consumer of the digital issue or subscription over the long term. Publishers have spent many years building up a print subscriber base, and the goal of the Digital Publishing Suite team is to help publishers easily maintain this relationship when transitioning to digital distribution.  Digital strategists at publishing companies are very focused on quickly accelerating digital readership in order to generate digital subscription and advertising revenue. As you know, advertising dollars depend on the accuracy and extensiveness of a reader database.

Consumer Limitations of the App Marketplaces
On the consumer side, an increasing number of print subscribers want to have access to digital content on all their devices.  If a reader has already purchased a print subscription, she does not want to purchase digital issues through the application store on her device.  If she purchases the subscription through the app store, she will not have access to back issues in digital format even if she has the print versions at home. Compounding the problem, if this user has multiple devices, she then needs to purchase a digital subscription through the application stores on each device.  All this leads to massive inconvenience for the print subscriber who simply wants to access digital issues that she has already paid for.  It is also in the publisher’s best interest to ensure that this high value print subscriber can access digital issues in order to keep this customer happy and simultaneously drive readership of digital content.

Solution: Direct Entitlement
Direct entitlement refers to the mechanism that allows publishers, member organizations, or corporations to make specific .folio files available to certain readers based on login credentials. In the case of magazines, it allows publishers to provide digital content to existing subscribers in one click. Business publishers can use direct entitlement to make specific content available to employees or members of an organization based on login credentials. A feature of Enterprise Edition of Digital Publishing Suite, direct entitlement strengthens the digital relationship between a publisher and reader by providing the publisher with user data. Digital Publishing Suite integrates with a publisher’s third-party or proprietary fulfillment system to make tablet content available to existing subscribers. The publisher knows which titles the reader subscribes to and the period of time the subscription has lasted. With access to user data, the publisher can provide special offers to each segment of its readership.

How Does It Work?
Adobe Digital Publishing Suite has created an API that works with entitlement services such as CDS Global, Time Customer Service (TCS), or Palm Coast Data (PCD). These subscription services allow publishers to house customer data with minimal coding. When a subscriber goes through a publisher’s website and sets up an ID, the fulfillment server, rather than the application store, houses the user data.

There are three basic stages of direct entitlement: Authentication, Entitlement, and Fulfillment.

• Authentication occurs when the reader taps on a banner in the viewer library that is designed for existing magazine subscribers. (See “Current Magazine Subscribers: Tap Here for Access” in the Reader’s Digest example below.) This is the “entitlement banner,” which is built with HTML5 and takes the user to an in-app view of the publisher’s web page. In the authentication process, the user creates an ID based on a print or web subscription. Then the user uses this new ID to sign in to the application.

• Entitlement: A publisher’s entitlement service provides a list of publications that a reader is entitled to, including special editions and back issues. When a user logs into the app, the entitlement service provides this list of publications to the device.

• Fulfillment: When a user chooses to download a publication, the app requests the publication from the fulfillment service, which is housed on Adobe servers. The fulfillment service confirms the user is entitled to the publication.

Learn More

• Watch Colin Fleming’s Direct Entitlement video on Adobe TV
• Read the whitepaper, Managing Customer Entitlement with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite
• Read about digital subscription payment options in Director of Product Management, Zeke Koch’s blog post
• Learn more about Adobe Digital Publishing Suite Enterprise Edition

Australian Personal Computer (APC) Magazine is one of the world’s longest published personal computing titles. “Launched in May 1980, we were there when Apple’s Macintosh and IBM’s PC were born; then got to ride in Bill Gates’ limousine when he launched Windows 95, and were in San Francisco’s main Apple store to buy Apple’s iPad when it arrived in 2010.”

And now… APC is on the iPad, and will soon be on Android devices. Created with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, it is sure to please the geek in all of us. Zoom into gadget pics, watch videos of product reviews, and (my favorite) follow step-by-step instructions on installing an SSD drive into your PC.

According to editor Tony Sarno, “We chose Digital Publishing Suite because it’s a full solution allowing publication, monetisation and analysis of content on tablet devices – we can use our existing investment in Adobe InDesign® CS5.5 and the included digital publishing tools to create an interactive magazine.  InDesign used in combination with Digital Publishing Suite provides the publishing infrastructure to get the app to a point where all we need to do is then submit it to the app stores. Best of all, we can do all this in-house, using existing magazine staff without any additional resources.”

• View Australian Personal Computer in the Digital Publishing Gallery
• Download Australian Personal Computer from the iTunes Store
• Read the press release: Adoption Continues to Grow for Adobe Digital Publishing Suite as Australia’s APC Magazine signs on

“Newsweek tap-dances into a new era this week with our reinvented iPad app that magically brings our annual Oscar Roundtable to life for the first time,” writes Tina Brown, Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek.

With a highly engaging issue, Newsweek embraced the multimedia features that Digital Publishing Suite offers. As Ms. Brown referenced in her introduction, Newsweek did a group interview with select 2012 Oscar-winning actors. Rotate the app and you can watch George Clooney play the ukulele, and feel the sting as Charlize Theron tosses a drink in your face.

Newsweek is blurring the lines between magazine and documentary, as you can watch the behind-the-scenes on BEAST TV, listen to Philip Glass while reading his interview, watch a CNN interview, and listen to reporter commentary for a deeper experience – all within the Newsweek application. It also takes advantage of social media. I shared a couple of articles with friends.

Last but not least, Newsweek understands monetization and the value of merchandising related content to already engaged readers.  As they say, your existing customer is your best customer. It took advantage of customized push notifications. While I was reading about Christine Lagarde and the IMF in the most recent issue of Newsweek built with Digital Publishing Suite, they offered me the Steve Jobs special edition:

• Download the Newsweek app from the iTunes Store
• Learn about Adobe Digital Publishing Suite Enterprise Features

Adobe has released an update to Digital Publishing Suite. These especially exciting features provide more out-of-the-box interactivity for enhanced reading experiences as well as opportunities to cross sell publications from within the app.

Nested Overlays in Slideshows
Digital Publishing Suite now allows for most overlay types within slideshows (multi-state objects, technically speaking) and scrollable frames. For example, you can include videos or web views within a slideshow. Within scrollable frames, designers can add overlay objects such as an image sequence or interactive buttons and then group the overlay objects with other objects in the content frame. For example, if you want to place a slideshow next to text that references photos in the slideshow, and you have a limited amount of space for that text, you can embed buttons within the text in a scrollable frame so that readers can synchronize the slideshow with what they are reading.

The only limitation for nested overlays is that you cannot build slideshows within slideshows. Bob Bringhurst provides instruction on embedding interactive overlays on the Digital Publishing Suite help site.

Videos in Slideshows

Web View in Slideshows

More Button Features
Digital Publishing Suite has expanded its versatility of button controls. Now you can create a set of buttons to start and stop audio and video. In addition, one button can control multiple actions in sequence. For example, readers can play a video and then watch a slideshow without having to click the button a second time. In the screenshots of a mockup demonstration provided below, there are four buttons that control three different slideshows. The fourth button allows all three slideshows to play in sequence. Bob Bringhurst provides instructions for using buttons in Digital Publishing Suite on the help site.

     The fourth button controls three sequential slideshows

Pinch and Zoom in PDF Stacks with Interactive Overlays
On the iPad, Digital Publishing Suite has allowed you to pinch and zoom PDF stacks. Now, PDF stacks with interactive overlays also permit pinch and zoom. For example, when a reader is watching a video, she can zoom into descriptive text on the page while the video continues playing.  Go here to learn how to enable pinch and zoom for the iPad.

     Pinch and Zoom While Video is Playing

Preview on Device for iPad
The Preview on Device feature that was available for Android devices is now available on the iPad as well. For the iPad, instead of using the acrobat.com web client, you can attach your iPad to your computer and copy the file directly to the iPad without going through the cloud. This requires using a third party device such as Phone Disk and only works with MacOS. See Bob Bringhurst’s instructions on setting up Preview on Device for iPad.

Custom Store for Enterprise Customers
Javascript APIs are available to Enterprise Edition customers, allowing you to create a custom store for cross-selling publications, anthologies and special editions. Download the latest version of The New Yorker, which has created a beautiful custom store.   Not only can traditional media companies take advantage of a custom store but retailers and other companies who provide services can upsell their existing customers by highlighting related goods and services within their branded application.

     If you have already downloaded The New Yorker app, you’ll need to update your content viewer so you can see the new store. In order to do this, you’ll need to go to the App Store and use the “updates” option.

Customized Push Notification Options
Push notifications are now optional for both Professional and Enterprise edition users. If you want to alert subscribers when a new issue is available, click the “Notify” button in Folio Producer Organizer, controlling the timing of the push notification.

Enterprise edition users with third party entitlement servers can also customize the timing and message for a push notification. For example, a magazine could post a notification that says, “The Election 2012 special edition is now available for download,” allowing the publisher to upsell and cross-sell content.

Restricted Distribution
Enterprise users can now restrict end user access to free folios. Now you can hide folios in the viewer library, allowing you to entitle customers to download specific content based on their sign-in accounts. For example, a membership organization may want to allow members access to exclusive, free folios, or a sales department may want individuals on its sales team to just have access to folios that are relevant to a specific geography or segment. Stay tuned for new options in restricted distribution.

Custom-Created Adobe Content Viewer
Now you can test content on the iPad without waiting. Until this point, if you upgraded your Folio Producer tools and wanted to test content using the Adobe Content Viewer, you had to wait until the latest version was approved by Apple. Adobe now allows you to use Viewer Builder to create a custom content viewer and preview your content on the iPad within the full context of the experience on the device. See Bob Bringhurst’s instructions on building a custom Content Viewer.

Account Administration
You can now assign and control the creation and access level of all accounts associated with the company’s master account. This means publishers now have a central place to assign, view and manage all Digital Publishing Suite provisioned accounts associated with the organization or title.

Here is a simple breakdown of some of the account administration options:

• Create “Creative” accounts for designers. These accounts are owned by the company and not by the individual user. Users of these accounts cannot build applications, view analytics, or publish folios. A typical “Creative” account would be a designer who can build and preview folio content or share it via Acrobat.com.
• Create “Publication” or “Producer” accounts. Users of these accounts can publish folio content to the fulfillment server.
• Enable Creative or Producer accounts to also have access to the Viewer Builder application.
• Promote any user to a “Master Admin”

Other Highlights

• Open up a video or slideshow that expands to the full page of the tablet without a chrome, or frame (sometimes called “chromeless modal web view”).
• Deliver free subscriptions through Apple Newsstand.
• Relink folios to source files if the file names or location have changed.
• Change the cover view on an Android device to show Grid View, Cover View or both, to accommodate for the smaller screen size.
• Watch a progress bar during the bundling process to know how much the download has progressed.
• Receive status updates through the dashboard to learn time sensitive information from Adobe.

Want More Information?
Visit the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite help site for more detail about this release. Author Bob Bringhurst provides great tutorials and can answer technical questions.

See Bob Bringhurst’s instructions on building a custom Content Viewer and watch Colin Fleming’s video on how to build a custom Content Viewer and preview your content on the iPad.

Post by Craig Morrow & Will Steuber, MEI

The prospect of putting out an engaging app in addition to your print product seems daunting, we know. How are you supposed to add an entire app to your portfolio without doubling your staff? Well, with the right preparation and some timely training, you could be publishing apps with the InDesign users already on your team. Let us explain how.

One of the greatest strengths of Digital Publishing Suite is that InDesign sits at its cornerstone. That means designers and editors are already familiar with the “new” software environment. So, with some understanding of Digital Publishing Suite and the  Folio Producer tools, your existing print and production team can easily learn how to create and publish interactive apps.

Workflow discipline, project planning and template creation are the essentials of an efficient app-production process. It is important that your team implement good habits upstream, such as proper styling, tagging and metadata management, which can save significant time down the line. And getting some startup help with templates and planning scenarios should further reduce your need to increase the head count. (Note, however, that some Digital Publishing Suite features, such as video and panorama, are more resource-intensive and time-consuming than others, so it all depends on how sophisticated you want to get.)

At MEI, we recently worked with a premiere publication in NY with a circulation of approximately 1.2 million.  They were faced with the challenge of building an app in addition to their print publication. Their designers were very comfortable with InDesign and could build attractive print layouts that were on brand for their publication but like so many publishers, they had grown accustomed to handing off all web/mobile based content initiatives to web developers. Ultimately, they were left feeling like they were losing control over design elements. This publisher needed a user-friendly tool that could leverage the strengths of their creative team, allowing them to maintain more control over the final digital product without adding tremendous overhead to the process.

So with a little investment in training, and the commitment and pre-existing skills of your existing staff, you can likely put out a digital edition and significantly increase your readership in a medium that is revolutionizing how we engage with content.

Craig Morrow is Director of Strategic Accounts and Will Steuber is Director of Creative Services at MEI. MEI was founded in 1990 as Managing Editor Inc., with the goal of providing innovative software solutions to the rapidly evolving publishing industry. Today the company delivers a comprehensive package of digital publishing, editorial workflow and automated ad layout systems for magazines, newspapers and other print and electronic publishers and communicators. Visit the Managing Editor website to learn more about their services.

Edge, a strategic content agency in Australia, launched a tablet publication for its client, Sportingbet. Sportingbet is one of Australia’s biggest online bookmakers, and they needed a quick turnaround and a quality tablet version of SportingMail, a quarterly magazine that covers sports events.

Edge embraced Digital Publishing Suite with its end-to-end workflow that utilized the team’s existing InDesign skills. Tech director Jamie Ragen and art director Jon Miller were able to build the first publication in three weeks, quickly learning Digital Publishing Suite along the way. As an agency, it’s important to be able to share drafts of the publication with the client. Ragen and Miller uploaded content to the hosted content server, sharing private versions of the folios with the Sportingbet team.

Embedding video into SportingMail was an asset for a publication that showcases sports activity. SportingMail customers loved the tablet version so much that they requested back issues of the publication. After the success of SportingMail, Edge received requests from its existing clients to build tablet publications for them, instigating growth in the agency’s offerings.

“We all know digital media is growing more and more in importance every day,” says Ragen. “It sits alongside print media and our ability to produce low-cost, high-quality digital magazines using Adobe technologies means we’re pushing ahead into this space. Edge can offer clients bespoke or template apps, either as standalone offerings or as extensions of their already-successful print magazines.”

• Read the full case study on Adobe.com.
• Check out SportingMail in the Adobe Digital Publishing Gallery.
• Visit the Digital Publishing Suite Professional Edition page.

McPheters & Co, whose iMonitor service evaluates publication based apps, posed the question in an Ad Age article: What can publishers do to reduce the number of app malfunctions? Customer service is important for publishers, and it’s imperative that apps function smoothly and provide benefits that customers deserve. The main problems that McPheters found when reviewing over 3,000 apps were related to authenticating existing print subscribers through direct entitlement, as well as various display problems: broken links, page load failures, and problems with audio and video.

Rebecca McPheters, CEO, interviewed Adobe Digital Publishing Suite evangelist Colin Fleming. Overall, the best solutions involve aggressive testing and good customer service. Similar to publishing in print, proofreading content in advance and providing customer service within the application are key.

According to Fleming, “Publishers can avoid many of these pitfalls by becoming better informed, following guidelines and testing applications thoroughly. Bad links and display issues should be uncovered in testing, much like proofreading content before it’s published.”

Want to know more? Read the article in Ad Age.

The results are in. Apps built with Digital Publishing Suite topped the charts in Apple’s Top Grossing Apps list after the 2011 holiday season. Congratulations to our customers for their success. The fact that Digital Publishing Suite was used to develop and monetize 14 out of the top 20 apps is evidence that it is becoming the standard platform for publishing digital publications and monetizing digital publications across the iPad and Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy or the Kindle Fire.

Check out  the Digital Publishing Suite publications that made the top 20 highest grossing apps through Apple Newsstand at the end of December.

• New Yorker Magazine
• Men’s Health
• National Geographic
• GQ
• Consumer Reports
• Wired
• Martha Stewart
• Glamour
• Runner’s World
• Vanity Fair for iPad
• Self
• Women’s Health
• Prevention
• Golf Digest

Discoverability Through Newsstands

Apple and Kindle Fire Newsstands push publications to the top of the stack, allowing potential readers to peruse the digital newsstand shelves and enable easy purchase of their favorite titles. Using Digital Publishing Suite, publishers can build newsstand-enabled applications that get noticed by content buyers and ultimately drive greater digital circulation.  This then leads to other monetization opportunities for even greater digital revenue streams in the future.

Cross Selling Through a Custom Store

Readers who have purchased a digital publication are often highly engaged with your brand and interested in consuming and purchasing related content. For example, check out the new custom HTML store available in The New Yorker application.  Built with Digital Publishing Suite, The New Yorker application is using a highly designed in-app store to merchandise related content including back issues of the magazine as well as supplemental anthologies.  Not only is Conde Nast able to use Digital Publishing Suite to capitalize on newsstand to get their app noticed and sell digital subscriptions, they can also start to branch into other revenue streams by creating a focused shopping experience within their application.  In essence, Conde Nast is turning readers into consumers of content.  However you slice it, Digital Publishing Suite is giving publishers the capability to build their digital business.

Boxoffice Media, publisher of the weekly Boxoffice magazine trade publication for the National Association of Theater Owners since 1920, has now unleashed a weekly iPad publication for the general public. Each Thursday, Boxoffice’s small team releases a new issue of Boxoffice Weekly. Amy Nicholson, Editor, provides content and Ken Bacon, Creative Director, builds each issue using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.

With a trade publication at the heart of Boxoffice, owner Peter Cane recognized the potential to reach a wider audience of moviegoers. The trade magazine reaches over 15,000 industry insiders each year. However, in the past year, 185 million people went to the movies 1.4 billion times. While the monthly trade magazine includes technical development, digital cinema, and best practices content for theater owners, Boxoffice realized it could also make some of the more mainstream content available to the rest of us: interviews with movie stars (Hear Kermit discuss collaborating with Jason Segal), information about the characters, actors, and director (What is it like to make the Muppets without Oz and Henson?) and lots of trailers.

In order to meet the publication’s tight deadlines, Bacon needed a turnkey solution with a short learning curve. Being familiar with the InDesign CS5.5 software and workflow allowed him to get the operation up and running. As Bacon said in an interview, “Making our weekly publication deadline couldn’t be done without Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. The end-to-end workflow tools in Adobe Digital Publishing Suite make it easy to add interactivity, preview and test articles, and publish our digital edition in just a few days.”

• Check out the latest Boxoffice issue here.
• Read the Boxoffice case study on Adobe.com.
• Read about the Boxoffice app in the Digital Publishing Gallery.