Introduction to Digital Publishing (to Tablets, Flash, PDF, and eBooks)

The ePublishing Revolution has begun, and it is as world-changing as the Computer Revolution of the 1970s and 1980s and the Desktop Publishing Revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. Your publication, be it enterprise-level, a regional weekly, or a quarterly product catalog, needs to capitalize on digital publishing now, before your competition carves out too big a piece of the market. Designers and advertising firms need to be ready yesterday; your clients are looking for providers to advance their publications into the new publishing reality.

With the Apple iPad and Amazon Kindle leading the charge, followed closely by battalions of digital ebook readers and tablets from Barnes & Noble, ASUS, Samsung, BlackBerry, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Dell, Microsoft, and scores of others, publications are going mobile, on demand, and interactive. Profitable magazines, newspapers, books, and even catalogs are no longer just lying there on the table or screen; they’re moving and talking and playing videos and making sales directly on the digital page. Consumers of publications are no longer passive readers but active participants in their media, using their fingers to swipe pages, flip through galleries of images and videos, zoom into details, rotate 3D objects through 360-degree views, and play, pause, rewind, and fast-forward video that may have been created a month or five minutes ago. Moreover, the content of these publications is no longer necessarily fixed and unmutable.

Digital newspapers can push to consumer’s devices seconds-old updates to stories initially published this morning or even yesterday. Digital catalogs can be updated instantly to reflect sales, sell-outs, and new product additions. Instead of requiring costly recalls and reprints, significant typos or erroneous data in ebooks can be corrected instantaneously, often before consumers even realize it was there. In digital magazines a single ad slot can now be sold multiple times instead of just once, with an array of ads rotating randomly or sequentially through the space–late creative can even be inserted after the digital issue has gone to press!

The ePublishing Revolution is ablaze, but it isn’t a single giant conflagration. There are many different devices and even more epublishing systems and technologies burning trails across the publishing landscape. Each tablet and ereader supports different file formats, each file format boasts different advantages and disadvantages, and each of the distinctively priced publishing systems works very differently, addresses different devices, creates dissimilar file formats, and offers varied features.

Which devices does your publication need to target?

Which interactive features do you need to include?

How much information do you need to collect about the distribution and use of your publication?

What is your budget for the publication?

Which epublishing system publishes to those devices, includes the required interactivity, collects and analyzes the right about of information, and does it all within budget?

Answering those questions is the focus of this course.

• You’ll be presented with an up-to-the-minute view of the digital publishing landscape.
• We will look at the various tablets, ereaders, and other devices, examining not only their capabilities but their places in, and shares of, the digital reading market so that you can decide which you need to publish to today, which tomorrow, and which you can safely ignore.
• We’ll examine the features and limitations of the various digital publication formats, not only from the perspective of interactivity but also with an eye toward their revenue-generation differences.
• We’ll compare and contrast the epublishing platforms and systems, looking toward the benefits and drawbacks of each, their capabilities, whether they can be used to repurpose existing for-print titles to digital publications, and the often complicated pricing models that drive these systems, from upfront fees to monthly rates, per issue fees, third-party licensing prices, and other costs.

Following this course you will have all the data and insight you need to decide when and how to advance your publication into the digital publishing reality of today and tomorrow.

Then, it’s time to move onto the hands-on production of digital publications.

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