Adobe & Condé Nast have worked together to launch The New Yorker tablet edition. Here’s Jason Schwartzman’s intro:
I found this bit about the publishing technology’s evolution interesting:
The New Yorker […] demanded not only design fidelity, but flexibility due to its weekly, text-heavy nature. To solve this design and production challenge, The New Yorker used HTML pages as part of its tablet edition. HTML provided flexibility for The New Yorker to rapidly flow text into the magazine application and meet the requirements of a frequent publishing cycle. In the future, the Digital Magazine Solution will provide the option of using either HTML pages for flexible publishing or rasterized images for publishers that demand pixel-perfect layouts.
My translation: Yes, the team is well aware of file size concerns, and they’re using various technologies (e.g. HTML) to give publishers choices. I expect we’ll be hearing more details soon.
File size is definitely a concern. I ended up dumping the Wired magazine issues I had purchased through the apps store because they were pushing my iPad sync times into hours. My best iPad magazine experiences are through Zinio.
A more accurate name would be The New Yorker iPad Edition, since it appears to be unavailable on any other tablets. Hopefully I’m wrong about that.
[The InDesign solution has always been meant to target multiple platforms (see previous). Apple’s Section 3.3.1 moves complicated that story, but the team rallied and created a new iPad reader very quickly. The net result is that output from ID can be run across operating systems. –J.]
Doesn’t Adobe have a technology called pdf or something that could be used to deliver searchable REAL text and smaller file sizes?
[Yes; stay tuned. –J.]