Adobe Digital Publishing

Better Homes & Gardens uses Digital Publishing Suite, Enterprise Edition, to cross- promote content, enable easy navigation, and provide high value product placement opportunities in its timeless publication.

Better Homes & Gardens is the 4th best selling magazine in the United States. It embraces monetization opportunities through several Enterprise features available in Digital Publishing Suite. The attractive custom store allows the publisher to promote back issues and special editions, as far back as April 2011. By using direct entitlement, print subscribers can gain access to interactive, digital versions of the magazine. In addition, the custom navigation bar allows readers to easily jump to the Table of Contents, current cover, and Help site.

Because Better Homes and Gardens features style and design ideas for a DIY-inclined audience, it uses the slideshow feature in Digital Publishing Suite to toggle between attractive, clean layouts and detailed product information. In this episode I share my favorite use of Digital Publishing Suite: readers can view a room in six different colors, see how the mood changes with each hue, and then navigate to the website to purchase.

Watch the app of the week video here:

By Teresa Demel

Going digital allows Newsweek to enhance print content with video, use social sharing to promote stories, and integrate the hottest current news into the weekly issue. Special features, such as exclusive articles and animations, provide incentives for readers to download the iPad app.

The Mad Men issue of Newsweek, released in March 2012, captures the reader’s attention with an elegant animated sequence of the show’s characters, created with HTML. The rest of the publication remains in character – with ‘60s style advertisements and news from the Mad Men era.

This app of the week video also walks through an article about architect Koolhaas, with video and slideshows showcasing examples of his work. Newsweek makes it easy for its brand ambassadors to share the stories, providing social media links in key articles.

• Download Newsweek for iPad.

• Check out the app of the week video here:

By Teresa Demel

Nature Publishing Group recently introduced the tablet edition of Scientific American for iPad.  In order to stay connected to its subscriber base, the publication uses direct entitlement, available in the Enterprise Edition of Digital Publishing Suite. Since I have a subscription to the print version of the magazine, I demonstrate the effortless one-step process of gaining access to the digital version.

As a magazine renowned for educating the public about scientific methodology and insights, Digital Publishing Suite allows Scientific American to more clearly illustrate scientific processes, such as how psychologists research animal desire and aversion, or concepts, such as the neural pathways that regulate pleasure.

Watch the video to see it in action: 

By Teresa Demel

By now, I am sure you have read the latest news about The New Yorker on the iPhone from Fast Company, Mashable, and All Things D. You have seen the video starring Lena Dunham. The team at Adobe is excited to see it in action. Check out the app of the week video below, where I walk you through the latest issue.

Watch the video here: 

By Teresa Demel

Us Weekly, published by Wenner Media, has recently adopted Digital Publishing Suite to create its iPad edition. In this week’s video, I demonstrate Us Weekly’s use of Auto-Archive, a solution that allows subscribers to store a fixed number of issues on their tablet at any point in time, freeing up space for other content.

Us Weekly is very selective in its use of interactive features for Digital Publishing Suite. Consistent with its fun brand, the Us Weekly team uses the interactivity to make the reading experience a little more entertaining. For example, readers play a matching game with photographs from Real Housewives, an effect that uses slideshows with dual-button controls.

Watch the video here:

By Teresa Demel

Last month I shared National Geographic Kids, which uses Digital Publishing Suite to teach and communicate with its captive youth audience. Its core publication, featured this week, is the official journal of the National Geographic Society (NGS) and provides a rich media experience for readers. Published by one of the largest non-profit scientific and educational institutions in the world, National Geographic leads the charge in bringing cutting edge science to its audience in innovative and engaging ways.

This video illustrates examples of National Geographic’s use of Digital Publishing Suite:

• Using HTML, it incorporates current information about Mount Everest, including maps that track current climbers, blogs that tell the story of their journey, and up-to-date information about weather and other conditions on the mountain.
• It cross-promotes multimedia content, such as the Flying Monster movie created by National Geographic Entertainment.
• Using interactive features in Digital Publishing Suite, it neatly displays beautiful photography within the context of its environment.
• Designers creatively built an animation using the image sequence feature in Digital Publishing Suite

Watch the App of the Week video here:

Last week, Dick’s Sporting Goods released 2012 Football, its first Digital Publishing Suite app on the iPad. Dick’s Sporting Goods is a Fortune 500 company and one of the largest sporting goods stores in the world. Its app is a retail catalog devoted to football cleats, equipment and apparel, designed to ease the gear research and purchasing process for its football customers. For example, interactive photos of gear highlight helpful product attributes for the customer, while in-app videos bring the product to life. Combining these interactive features with the immersive experience of a catalog app, Dick’s Sporting Goods is able to showcase products in the context of their environment and inspire customers to buy.  To this end, the app is part of the retailer’s omnichannel strategy, with each page including a “Buy Now” button, which opens the Dick’s Sporting Goods website and allows the consumer to purchase equipment without leaving the app.

In addition, the Dick’s Sporting Goods’ marketing team uses analytics in its catalog app. With extended metrics available from Adobe SiteCatalyst, the retailer can understand buying behavior in the app and optimize tablet content. In addition, the retailer can integrate these analytics across its other channels to create a unified view of its multichannel business.

With this catalog app, Dick’s Sporting Goods has already seen initial success.  The app has already received 5-star ratings from iTunes reviewers. In addition, the interactivity and immersive format are resonating with customers.  As an iTunes customer succinctly stated:

“Love this app. Being able to swipe cleats to see different colors is very cool. Great videos too. I have other catalog apps on my iPad. This one is way more interactive. I like that I can purchase what I want right from the app.”

Finally, the app designers have used Digital Publishing Suite features in creative and even crafty ways, which are showcased in the video below. By integrating scrolling frames, nested overlays, and navigation buttons, they provide extensive product information within a single page, allowing readers to compare items side by side, instead of flipping from one page to another.

• Visit the iTunes store to download the app
• Learn more about the app in the App of the Week video below.

Watch the video here:

National Geographic for Kids embraces interactivity in Digital Publishing Suite in order to provide an intuitive reading experience for kids. Targeted at children ages 6+, the iPad magazine uses the following features in order to help children read independently, which is great for kids and their parents! These techniques are advantageous for other publications where the written word cannot be the sole means of communication, such as a magazine designed for an international audience or for the visually impaired.

• Visual Table of Contents with direct links to articles
• Scrollable frames to guide their eye toward highlighted features
• Audio overlays to give the reader directions

Check out the video here: 

In this week’s video, Teresa Demel and Colin Fleming share Backpacker articles with one another via email and Twitter. Social sharing is now a turnkey solution in Digital Publishing Suite, allowing readers to easily share great content with friends, whether they are on the iPad or laptop/desktop computer.

Teresa and Colin demonstrate the following steps in DPS social sharing:

• Share an article via email from within the Digital Publishing Suite app
• Open the shared content in the Digital Publishing Suite web viewer and browse through articles in the Table of Contents until a paywall is reached
• Open an article on the iPad after clicking on a shared link
• Share an article widely via Twitter

Want to learn more about setting up social sharing? Read the article in the Adobe Digital Publishing Developer Center article, Integrated social sharing with Digital Publishing Suite. 

Watch the video here:

America’s Test Kitchen has recently used Digital Publishing Suite to create and distribute a highly interactive version of Cook’s Illustrated magazine on the iPad. Cook’s Illustrated is known for testing recipes with scientific rigor. It also helps us select the perfect products for our kitchens by conducting thorough reviews of products and food brands. The iPad version looks similar to the print version, but with more action and demonstrations.

In this app of the week video, we show how Cook’s Illustrated uses features in Digital Publishing Suite to create a more interactive experience for its readers:

• Buttons and slideshows for step-by-step cooking instructions, quick tips, and product reviews
• Videos of cooking procedures and product testing

See it in action in this video!