Learn to make iPad magazines: Recording available

Tablets

A number of folks asked whether the recent demo/Q&A session on using InDesign to create tablet publications would be recorded for later viewing. The answer: yep, here it is. [Via Jennifer Kremer]

15 thoughts on “Learn to make iPad magazines: Recording available”

  1. Thanks John,
    I was enjoying that, particularly the panorama integration, which I’ve not seen in any ipad publications yet… then we got to the price.
    $699 per month. Ouch. I’m not sure if that’s per publication, or total per month, but either way – no freelance, SME, photographers etc will be able to use the new service.
    Just to break even on Adobe publication costs we’d need to sell 2300+ copies of a digital magazine/folio etc at $5 each. (Less Apple’s 30% cut) The reality is 99+% of us would never sell 2300+ copies of our publications. Of course selling 2300 copies doesn’t make us a single cent for the actual work of producing the content.
    By comparison, I did a short run digital book of local panoramic photography for a client recently.
    80 pages, hard cover, 40 copies. Made $15 per book after printing costs + a book design fee. I’m pretty sure they’d be interested in an iPad version that includes the 360 interactive panoramas, and I’d love to do it for them… the fact the book is already an Indesign CS5 project would make it even quicker to produce. But if the costs mentioned in the demo are correct… I can’t think of a single client from the last 15yrs who would pay for an iPad publication via Adobe.
    Here’s hoping I completely misunderstood the pricing structure.

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  2. Yes, a very interesting webcast and this has to be the future of publishing but agree with previous comment, the costs (US$600+ per month) for small companies like ours are, well, eye-watering.
    These high costs would freeze out small companies who want to design and produce small run publications, magazines, newsletters. I hope I’m missing something here and hope that Adobe has another pricing structure tucked away somewhere for small, medium size businesses who would like to make us of this new and exciting technology.
    I fear that if smaller companies (i.e. mine) and organisations are frozen out by Adobe’s high monthly charges then a non-Adobe software house will move in and fill the vacuum. If this happens it will lessen the chance of Adobe setting the de facto standard for digital publishing and that surely can’t be good for Adobe.
    On a broader point, we invest heavily in Adobe products (Master Suite CS5 isn’t exactly inexpensive) and I do feel I am, in a sense, part of the Adobe family. Suddenly I am sensing that Adobe is, in a roundabout way, giving me the cold shoulder and rather than encouraging me to be part of the digital world, Adobe is now, it would appear, cutting me out of a significant part of it.
    I really do look forward to Adobe’s response……
    Richard Broom

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  4. Interesting thread. We have been close to Adobe for years, and ain’t shifting anytime soon. As far as pricing, we publish college textbooks with one company (AgainstTheClock.com) as well as a fishing magazine. The sports mag can’t pay it, but the book company cannot afford not to. Compare prices from the major ebook houses to distribute secure content. It’s way
    more ( for us ) than $600 a month.

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  5. This suite looks very exciting and I would love to be able to use it for my small publishing company. But I am extremely disappointed at the pricing. $600+ a month is way out of our reach! I truly hope Adobe reconsiders pricing and comes up with something that is much more “reachable” by small companies…
    -J

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  6. Thanks for the link to interesting and informative webcast. I have sampled several high-profile publications produced this way (from Project, GQ, Esquire, Wine & Food, to Martha Stewart) and the potential of the technology is (in theory) enormous, especially from the point of view of an educator, like me.
    That’s why it is especially unfortunate that the fee structure Adobe set for using the technology will price it out of reach for many users, including not-fot-profit educational institutions. As an educator working in an IT department of a a middle-sized, regional university, I have to say that it’s not even the $699 monthly price tag that will make it inaccessible (we could probably TRY to get $8.5K annual grant funding of some sort, although it would take a LOT of persuading in this economic climate). Paradoxically, It’s the “negligible” 30 cents-per-download additional fee that Adobe will charge on top of the monthly $700 that would be the real deal breaker. Even if each of our 10.000+ students downloaded just 3 free university publications per year (for which we would not charge them, and Apple iTunes App store wouldn’t charge us, just as it doesn’t charge for free apps and iBooks), Adobe would still collect an additional $9000 in download fees from us (on top of the monthly $700 subscription fee)! Because the number of downloads from the app store cannot be controlled / limited / capped, and therefore cannot be realistically budgeted for, no sane University administrator will ever consider this until the fee structure changes, and becomes more predicable…
    I hope Adobe reconsiders this in the near future, and comes up with some more manageable fee structure, especially for non-profits that want to distribute publications for which they do not plan to charge their readers.

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  7. After watching the demo and posting, I did some looking around. Adobe has stated that the Digital Publishing Suite is not for ‘us’, ie the small business or the independent/freelance designer/photographer. It is for big business. Adobe figure that someone might want to deal with ‘us’ via their partner program, but it won’t be direct with Adobe.
    http://forums.adobe.com/thread/747387?tstart=60
    “Will you have a solution for small/independent publishers?
    We certainly hear you loud and clear (and appreciate your feedback) that there is a demand for independent publishers to publish to tablet devices. With this in mind, we expect to enable partners to resell the Digital Publishing Suite services; in turn, these partners may wish to address small independent publishers. At this point, however, we have no details to announce around a partner ecosystem. In the meantime, please continue to use and experiment with the solution no cost via Adobe Labs or the prerelease program.”
    Here’s the full pricing structure:
    http://www.adobe.com/products/digitalpublishingsuite/pricing/
    Here’s an adobe forums thread on the topic… basically composed of people repeating what we’ve said above:
    http://forums.adobe.com/thread/743074?start=0&tstart=0

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  8. I can’t seem to view the video on my Mac even though I have Flash 10.1 installed. It keeps asking for an Adobe Connect Add-on?

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  14. Hopefully you read this, I tried to find the latest post on the subject of the Digital Publishing Suite to ask you a question. I was wondering if you knew how the Jay-Z book app was created? Also wondering if Adobe will create a suite for books like DPS? I thought I read early on about a solution for book publishers.

    Reply

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