'Net Features : digital publishing

Better Looking Digital Pubs with Amazon KF8 Format

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:55:00 GMT

The digital world of ebooks is about to get a lot more attractive. Amazon just announced that several new features, including HTML5 support, will be arriving in Kindle Format 8 (KF8) – the upcoming file format that will replace Mobi 7. Folks, gone are the days of the black and white ebook.

KF8, which will roll out to Amazon’s latest generation e-readers and reading apps in the next few months, provides publishers the ability to develop digital publications that require rich formatting and design functionality. The file format will be an ideal fit for children’s books, comics and graphic novels, cookbooks and even technical and engineering books.

The KF8 format adds around 150 new formatting capabilities including fixed layouts, nested tables, callouts, sidebars, Scalable Vector Graphics (SCG) and much more. A list of the most important enhancements in KF8 can be found here.

Amazon’s Kindle Publisher Tools (including KindleGen 2 and Kindle previewer 2) do not currently support KF8, but Amazon expects availability soon. Amazon noted that all currently supported content will continue to work – e.g. .mobi files. Information on how to update existing titles to take advantage of KF8 capabilities will be available in the upcoming update of the Kindle Publishing Guidelines.

PixelMags Offers HTML5 Compatibility to Advertisers

Michael Garrity — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 17:30:00 GMT

PixelMags, the content distribution software and publishing tools provider, has recently amped up its Ad Network, Ads by PixelMags, by introducing full HTML5 advertisements.

The company specializes in magazine application publishing and have established services for both publishers and advertisers. Ads by PixelMags is designed for the digital magazine industry.

Now, in conjunction with Starz and Anchor Bay Entertainment, PixelMags is allowing digital publishers to take advantage of their content delivery software (CDS) and HTML5 capabilities and third party companies are able to promote themsevles to PixelMags' readers. The new HTML5 pages are fully interactive and can do things like display videos and allow users to buy products without ever leaving the app.

The first advertisements displayed are for the Blu-Ray releases of the popular shows Spartacus and Camelot.

PixelMags makes it possible for advertisers to run adds in multiple magazines, rather than just one, which gives them the opportunity to reach as broad or specific of an audience as they want. The entirety of PixelMags' reader database, which includes over 200 different magazines, is now open to advertisers.

Among the new features introduced by Ads by PixelMags are enhanced ad placement opportunities, the ability to choose the ad page of an issue and allowing advertisers to control and edit their advertisements. There is also the option for advertisers to specifically target certain demographics, such as age, sex or device (iPhone or iPad).

Newsstand App Coming from Digital Publishing Suite

Michael Garrity — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 02:00:00 GMT

I don't know how something like this hasn't been developed yet for the iPad, and how it wasn't Apple that jumped on the idea, but Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite is currently developing Newsstand, a brand new application for iOS5 that will play the role of digital storefront for magazines and newspapers.

First, let's drop some knowledge. Facts and figures show that iPad sales continue to push forward, with over 2.5 million of the tablets sold over the last fourteen months. That's a lot, to be sure, but what's important to note is that with more people buying tablets, the purposes many have for acquiring them are also expanding. No longer are users just young people who want to play games and use the Internet and social media; in fact, now over half of all tablet owners use them to read newspapers and/or magazines.

However, the folks over at Adobe noticed a problem: the discoverability of magazine and newspaper apps is much lower than that of their counterparts, such as games, videos, plug-ins and other content. Moreover, since these tablets have a limited screen area, these reader apps can quickly get pushed to the back. While a Forrester study shows that tablet owners typically download an average of 17 applications, some feel that if iPad owners start (or, in some cases, continue) to download apps as ravenously as iPhone owners, these reader apps will get lost in the shuffle.

But if digital publishing is supposed to be the future, and trust me, publishing companies are banking on it, driving awareness of these various reader apps is crucial. Promoting an app, marketing digital content to print subscribers and leveraging social media are just a few of the methods that companies currently use to metaphoically get their publications into customers' hands. This is why Adobe's Newsstand can be a powerful tool for publishers.

Newsstand will provide readers with access to their favorite subscriptions from one central location as soon as they become available and, this is key, allow the readers to view the issue from outside of the magazine or newspaper's regular application. The application will offer full support for subscriptions so that publishers can created Newsstand-enabled apps, which will drastically incread the discoverability of their content and, if all goes according to plan, increase subscription sales and advertising revenue.

Here's the best part, or at least the most convenient. Applications that are created with Digital Publishing Suite to be detected by Newsstand will automatically be downloaded to the Newsstand app's shelf. This means no long download times to bother with on the user's part; in fact, it means no downloading at all on the user's part. The latest issues of their magazine or newspaper subscriptions will just be immediately placed on their shelf and ready to go as soon as they become available. These Suite-created Newsstand apps will also display on the shelf with the covers of the latest issue, which gives the whole thing a very inviting look.

According to Adobe, publishers will be able to start building apps for Newsstand shortly after the release of iOS5 and the Newsstand application.

Medialets Ad Platform & Adobe Digital Publishing Suite

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 10:00:00 GMT

Last week Adobe announced that it expects to integrate the Medialets mobile advertising platform software developer kit (SDK) with Adobe® Content Viewer software in the Enterprise Edition of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.

Using the Medialets’ ad serving platform, Adobe will deliver an advertising workflow for publishers to monetize digital publications – initial ad asset creation is authored using Adobe’s industry standard Creative Suite® 5 software, advertising inventory management and delivery via Medialets, with final publication delivery and optimization using Digital Publishing Suite.

“The integration of the Medialets platform will increase ad monetization potential for publications using Digital Publishing Suite, as well as improve the efficiency for delivering ad creative in publications on tablet devices,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president, Creative and Interactive Solutions, Adobe. “Publishers will be able to take advantage of a set of tightly integrated solutions that cover all aspects of the advertising workflow, from content creation to delivery to analytics.”

Publishers will be able to insert a Medialets ad overlay as a placeholder for advertising creative directly within an Adobe InDesign® layout using Digital Publishing Suite authoring tools. Publishers and ad agencies who purchase the Enterprise Edition of Digital Publishing Suite, and who are also Medialets customers, will then be able to deploy rich media creative into the advertising overlay using the Medialets ad platform, allowing targeted ad serving based on ad scheduling, geolocation and other factors.

The eBook is Back at B&N e-Bookstore

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:16:00 GMT

Who said eBooks were dead? Bookseller Barnes & Noble just launched a dedicated ebookstore and while it may not be the perfect venue to promote products and service for Web professionals, it may just signal the return of the ebook as a valid content publishing format.

B&N customers will be able to buy eBooks and read them on numerous platforms including the iPhone and iPod touch (which consequently is the number one most download book app), BlackBerry smartphones and Windws and Mac computers (laptops and desktops). Barnes and Noble also announced today that it will be the exclusive eBookstore provider on the upcoming Plastic Logic eReader device – which will in turn power the eBookstore for the Plastic Logic eReader device. The wireless eReader is slated to debut in early 2010.

How important is this development? Over 700,000 titles will be available immediately, making the new service the World Wide Web’s largest collection of eBooks available in one place. In fact, more than 500,000 public domain books (from Google) are available for free download.

"Today marks the first phase of our digital strategy, which is rooted in the belief that readers should have access to the books in their digital library from any device, from anywhere, at any time," said William J. Lynch, President of BN.com. "As America's #1 bookstore and newsstand, our goal at Barnes & Noble is to build a service that revolves around the customer, enabling them to have access to hundreds of thousands of titles and read on their smartphone, PC, and many other existing and future devices. We want to make eBooks simple, accessible, affordable and convenient for everyone."