Welcome to TFP’s weekly roundup of interesting and noteworthy stories from the publishing world. This week we’re discussing everything you need to know about Adobe DPS Release 20, Hearst’s digital strategy, Businessweek‘s award win, and more.

• At its Digital Publishing Summit this week, Adobe announced Release 20 of its Digital Publishing Suite and the new features that are now live with this version. DPS Release 20 offers many long-awaited features and several enhancements, along with DPS support for iPhone, InDesign CS6 and feature parity for CS5 and CS5.5. We recapped everything you need to know about DPS Release 20 on the TFP blog.
• Hearst is all in on digital magazines. In a recent interview, Duncan Edwards, CEO of Hearst Magazines International, remarked that the company hopes to reach “1 million paid digital sales on tablets a month for the U.S. by the end of the year.”
• Bloomberg Businessweek took home the Magazine of the Year award at The Society of Publication Designers’ 47th Annual Design Competition. Businessweek’s competitors in the category were IL–Intelligence in Lifestyle, Lotus, New York, Port, Time, and GQ.
• America’s Test Kitchen released the digital version of its Cook’s Illustrated print magazine, optimized for the new iPad, on Thursday. With guidance from Technology for Publishing, America’s Test Kitchen was able to create a product unlike any other digital food magazine on the market, by leveraging existing video content developed for its website and merging it with issue-specific editorial content to create a new experience for its readers. The app is available for purchase through Apple’s iTunes store.
• Real Simple is leading the way for magazines on social pinboard site Pinterest. The magazine has reached 100,000 followers, far surpassing the next-most-followed magazine, Better Homes and Gardens, which has 58,000 followers. Pinterest has proved to be more than “just another social network” for the title, providing twice as much referral traffic as Facebook and Twitter combined.

This Week in Publishing appears every Friday on the TFP blog. Every week we compile interesting and noteworthy stories from the publishing world and put together a wrap-up to help our readers stay up-to-date. Think we missed something great? Leave a comment below and let us know.

The Cook’s Illustrated app includes several unique interactive features that make it ideal for use in the kitchen by home cooks. Every feature recipe offers a “cooking mode,” which, when activated, walks the user through the recipe via a step-by-step photo slideshow accompanied by preparation instructions. App users can cook directly from the slideshow, without needing to refer to an ingredients list or the master recipe. Users also have the option to watch a video of the recipe being prepared by a test kitchen expert, from start to finish. In addition, the magazine’s popular equipment and ingredient reviews are available in expanded form in the new app.

“We are happy to provide readers with another choice as to how they can access our content,” said David Mack, Vice President of Marketing at America’s Test Kitchen. “With videos, ‘cooking mode,’ and other enhancements only available with the app for iPad, we feel that the magazine is even more useful for helping our readers to get the best results from our recipes.”

Early on in the process, Technology for Publishing assisted America’s Test Kitchen with vetting approaches to creating the app. TFP then guided America’s Test Kitchen in launching its first digital issue by helping the design team learn to use the app development tools effectively and providing technical assistance and support.

“In the early design stages, Technology for Publishing provided useful insight and guidance as we made key usability and feature-set decisions,” said Amy Klee, Design Director at America’s Test Kitchen. “They also supplied technical guidance to our design group and were a reliable resource as we worked through the details to complete and publish our app. With Apple launching the new iPad in the middle of our process of creating our app, TFP was very helpful working with our group to revise our app to take advantage of the higher resolution of the new iPad.”

“America’s Test Kitchen’s content is so compelling and suitable for an interactive iPad magazine,” added Margot Knorr Mancini, president of Technology for Publishing. “It’s rewarding to see such a stellar team put together a product like this, and to be able to support them in that process.”

About America’s Test Kitchen

America’s Test Kitchen is a real 2,500-square-foot test kitchen located just outside of Boston that is home to more than three-dozen full-time cooks and product testers. Their mission is simple: to develop the absolute best recipes for all of your favorite foods. To do this, they test each recipe 30, 40, sometimes as many as 70 times, until they arrive at the combination of ingredients, technique, temperature, cooking time, and equipment that yields the best, most foolproof recipe.

About Technology for Publishing

Technology for Publishing™ LLC is a consulting firm that has been providing process and technical consulting to magazine, book, newspaper, and corporate publishers for more than 20 years. With a notable list of long-standing clientele, TFP is a recognized leader in helping companies transform their content publishing strategies, processes, and systems into fluid, flexible content flows.

Folio Producer Updates

Folio Details are now available in a panel to the right of a selected folio. The panel contains several buttons for managing folios, including Publish, Notify, Unpublish, and Export. Description and Binding are fields are available, in addition to a thumbnail and resolution detail for the folio.

Publish is now a background operation, so you can continue to work on other things while it’s running.

Publish Requests are now an option under the View drop-down. The default selection in this drop-down is All Folios; Publish Requests is the second option. Use the Publish Requests view to check on the status of the Publish background operation. In the future, we can also expect to see folios on the distribution server in this view.

Viewer Builder Updates

iPhone Viewer creation is now available in Folio Builder, allowing simultaneous viewer creation for both the iPhone and iPad. The iPhone Viewer has rendition support for both classes of iPhone devices—SD and HD—as well as differentiated banner-ad support for Entitlement. All DPS features are supported except bookmarking and social sharing, but these are expected soon. A configurable iPhone welcome screen is an option available to Enterprise customers. The iPhone viewer has been optimized for single-handed use. Back and TOC button are at the bottom left and right, respectively. Browse mode and the Scrubber have been combined into a single slider at the bottom center. Note: Adobe’s Content Viewer for iPhone is awaiting approval by Apple.

Social sharing has been expanded from Facebook support only to now include Twitter, Email, and Copy Link. See the Adobe site for more info on how to use social sharing.

Status icons for all viewer image assets now reflect status colors, with green indicating OK, yellow not optimal, and red not OK. A partial viewer build can be saved and returned to for editing later.

Web Viewer

The long-waited Web Viewer is now available. Here are just a few features to look for:

• Web Viewer will allow a DPS publication link to be shared and viewed in a browser.
• Any content published as public can now also be shared as a link.
• Controls to protect/unprotect articles for public viewing are managed via the Account Admin tools and Folio Producer.
• Paywall controls allow for thresholds to be set for sharing content.
• Several options are available for configuring this useful component of DPS. TFP will describe more details about this in a upcoming blog post!

What’s Next: Release 21

Adobe hinted at a few new features we can expect to see in the next version, which will provide desired enhancements in multiple categories:

• A Save As feature with better DPS version management tools to help keep DPS tools, Folio Builder, Folio Producer, and Viewer Builder in sync.
• A custom HTML library with tools for creating custom viewers, merchandising, and presentation of content available to the reader.
• The addition of Hot Zones—definable areas on the left and right edges of pages for swiping.
• An Open Folio option after downloading, to improve the reader experience.
• A Folio Producer API release, which will allow publishing system vendors (such as vjoon) to finally link their systems to Folio Producer.

Welcome to TFP’s weekly roundup of interesting and noteworthy stories from the publishing world. This week we’re discussing the National Magazine Award winners, Adobe Creative Suite CS6, staff changes at The Atlantic, and more.

• The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) National Magazine Awards took place last week, with Time taking home the Magazine of the Year award. Find out which other magazines earned top honors in our National Magazine Award winners recap. Looking for the National Magazine Awards for Digital Media winners? We have a full recap of the winners from that event, too.
• Adobe announced that Creative Suite 6 is now available for purchase. Is your organization making the move to InDesign CS6? Need to know what features the new version offers? Our newest handbook, What’s New: InDesign CS6, will walk you through everything you need to know, so you’ll be up and running on CS6 fast.
• The Atlantic saw some major staff changes this week. Editor James Bennet is set become the magazine’s first ever editor in chief, with colleagues Bob Cohn and Scott Stossel being promoted to Atlantic Digital editor and Atlantic magazine editor, respectively.
• Recent research by the GfK MRI iPanel indicates that tablet owners aren’t 100% satisfied with the digital magazine experience yet. So, what’s missing? What do you expect from a digital magazine? Share your opinion in the poll following our blog post on readers’ expectations for tablet publications.
• Pricing digital content has been an ongoing struggle for many publishers. Early on, there weren’t any precedents, so the publishers who forged ahead into paywalls did so, for the most part, using trial and error. Luckily, we’re now reaching a point where we can review what’s been successful—and not so successful—for these early adopters. Some of the items on the Nieman Journalism Lab’s list of nine things you can learn from early experiments in pricing might surprise you.

This Week in Publishing appears every Friday on the TFP blog. Every week we compile interesting and noteworthy stories from the publishing world and put together a wrap-up to help our readers stay up-to-date. Think we missed something great? Leave a comment below and let us know.

Some industry insiders complain that publishers aren’t taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the tablet platform and are instead simply taking static print content and turning it into static tablet content. In a recent opinion piece in International Business Times, Michael Nunez claims that publishers so far have failed to provide a better experience for tablet readers than print or the web already offer. He squarely places the blame not on the technology itself but on the “catastrophic failure of editorial and design vision” and a failure to take advantage of the features that the medium is capable of delivering.

Nunez’s complaint ignores one key impediment to such innovation: the cost. According to an article in AdWeek, some magazine publishers are deciding that their money would be better spent trying to establish a presence on as many tablet platforms as possible, rather than adding interactive features to their digital publications. Considering how rapidly the tablet market is evolving, with device upgrades like Apple’s new iPad and software updates like Adobe’s DPS Release 19 (and this week 20), it’s no wonder some publishers are having a hard time keeping up–and having to make some tough choices when it comes to investing in their futures.

The fact is, although print magazines still account for 99% of publishers’ paid circulation versus their digital counterparts, readers are expected to continue their shift to digital. And it’s also inevitable that technologies will continue to evolve, and that publishers will constantly find themselves in catch-up mode as a result. But innovators are leading the way and helping to forge a path that eventually the rest of the publishing industry will be ready to follow.

Who do you see as a leader in the digital publishing market? And who are the ones to watch? Share your thoughts in the comments section below. We’d love to get your take!

Please take a moment to share your opinion of what a tablet experience should be – we’ll share the results in an upcoming blog.

Magazine of the Year

WINNER: Time

General Excellence, Print

General-Interest Magazines – Honors large-circulation weeklies, biweeklies, and general-interest monthlies

WINNER: Bloomberg Businessweek

Women’s Magazines – Honors women’s magazines, including health and fitness magazines and family-centric publications

WINNER: O, The Oprah Magazine

Lifestyle Magazines – Honors food, travel, and shelter magazines, as well as city and regional publications

WINNER: House Beautiful

Active- and Special-Interest Magazines – Honors magazines serving targeted audiences, including enthusiast titles

WINNER: Inc.

Thought-Leader Magazines – Honors literary, scholarly, and professional publications, as well as small-circulation general-interest magazines

WINNER: IEEE Spectrum

Design

WINNER: GQ

Photography

WINNER: Vogue

News and Documentary Photography

WINNER: Harper’s Magazine, for “Juvenile Injustice,” October

Feature Photography

WINNER: The New York Times Magazine, for “Touch of Evil,” Dec. 11

Single-Issue Topic

WINNER: New York, for “The Encyclopedia of 9/11,” Sept. 5-12

Magazine Section

WINNER: New York, for “Strategist”

Personal Service

WINNER: Glamour, for “The Secret That Kills Four Women a Day,” June

Leisure Interests

WINNER: Saveur, for “Italian American,” December

Public Interest

WINNER: The New Yorker, for “The Invisible Army,” June 6

Reporting

WINNER: The New Yorker, for “The Apostate,” Feb. 14 and 21

Feature Writing

WINNER: Esquire, for “Heavenly Father!” October

Profile Writing

WINNER: D Magazine, for “He Is Anonymous,” April

Essays and Criticism

WINNER: New York, for “Paper Tigers,” May 16

Columns and Commentary

WINNER: Vanity Fair, for columns by Christopher Hitchens

Fiction

WINNER: Zoetrope: All-Story, for “The Hox River Window,” Fall

Welcome to TFP’s weekly roundup of interesting and noteworthy stories from the publishing world. This week we’re discussing The Christian Science Monitor‘s digital transformation, the Alternate Layout feature in InDesign CS6, the WPA Conference 2012, and more.

• Poynter put together a great piece on The Christian Science Monitor and its digital transformation over the past three years. The magazine moved from a daily print edition to a weekly, shifting daily operations to the web. The result? Traffic and revenues are rising.
• One of the most anticipated features in the release of InDesign CS6 was the Alternate Layout function. Alternate Layout allows designers to create multiple versions of the same layout for different formats or devices, within a single InDesign file, saving time and increasing efficiency. Watch Adobe evangelist Terry White demonstrate the feature for Adobe TV.
• The Western Publishing Association (WPA) hosted its annual conference last week, and Folio magazine provided a helpful, concise recap of the event’s best content.
• PEPCON: The Print + ePublishing Conference is fast approaching, and we’re looking forward to attending. If you’ve been on the fence about whether you’ll make the trip to San Fransisco, maybe a discount would help sway you? When registering, enter PANCAKE at checkout and receive a $25 discount.
• National Geographic and Wired were among the winners of The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences 16th Annual Webby Awards, announced this week. Each Webby Award category has two winners, the Webby Award winner and the Webby People’s Voice Award winner. The best magazine site category winners were Condé Nast’s Wired, for the Webby Award, and National Geographic, for the People’s Voice Award.

This Week in Publishing appears every Friday on the TFP blog. Every week we compile interesting and noteworthy stories from the publishing world and put together a wrap-up to help our readers stay up-to-date. Think we missed something great? Leave a comment below and let us know.

Watch the video below to see Adobe Evangelist Terry White walk through how this new feature works.

Want to know more about how to use Alternate Layout, and other new InDesign CS6 features? Our new e-handbook, What’s New: InDesign CS6, provides the detailed, step-by-step instructions you need to get up and running on InDesign CS6 fast.

Welcome to TFP’s weekly roundup of interesting and noteworthy stories from the publishing world. This week we’re discussing Adobe’s launch of Creative Cloud and CS6, how InDesign CS6′s new features will impact design, ABI Research’s tablet app study, and more.

• The biggest news of the week was Adobe’s launch of Creative Cloud and CS6. Watch the full presentation below to see the keynotes, demos of new features, and more.

• With the announcement of Adobe CS6 came lots of questions about what new features were being introduced, and how they’ll affect design and workflow. We discussed five of the most dramatic new features of InDesign CS6 on the TFP blog, and we also made our newest e-handbook, What’s New: InDesign CS6, available for pre-ordering.
• 80% of tablet app downloads will be focused on games, digital publishing, social networking, and e-commerce by 2016, according to a new study released by ABI Research.
• When Apple introduced the new iPad, the first thing the publishing industry wanted to know was, “How does this affect us?” The answer came pretty quickly; the device’s increased screen resolution meant that many existing magazine apps needed to be optimized. Over the past month, we’ve heard publishers slowly start to announce that their titles are optimized for the new iPad, like MSLO’s Everyday Food and Whole Living, and this week, Condé Nast announced that all of its titles are now new iPad-friendly. Although optimizing for the new iPad adds to existing digital publishing workflows, it’s clear that it’s a necessary step.
• How does your organization view its content? Do you aim for a “create once, publish many“ model? Margot Knorr Mancini explains why you should, on the TFP blog.

This Week in Publishing appears every Friday on the TFP blog. Every week we compile interesting and noteworthy stories from the publishing world and put together a wrap-up to help our readers stay up-to-date. Think we missed something great? Leave a comment below and let us know.

In my many years of working with and advising publishers on how they should produce their content, one of the things I talked about early on and in the last century (OK, I’m dating myself now!) was the concept of CREATE ONCE, PUBLISH MANY.

For many years, most publishers’ focus had been print-centric, with the print story representing the beginning and end of the creative and editorial process around content. Content creators thought only within those boundaries and within that short life cycle, and not about how the content might continue to thrive over the long term.

At TFP, we’ve been asked on many occasions to bring in technology to help fix problems, generate more revenue, and position publishers for the future within the boundaries of that print-centric process. I remember telling publishers, “You’re looking at this in the wrong way—you need to think about the content as the goal and not the end result in a publishing process.” At the time, they looked at me like I had two heads and really didn’t understand what I meant. Nevertheless, I didn’t give up. I came up with concepts such as the “content conveyor belt” as an analogy for bringing content through a magazine editorial process with the understanding that more content life existed beyond that process. (Funny how that has emerged as the name of a new feature in this week’s digital-friendly release of InDesign CS6). While the magazine brought in immediate revenues, the content—the ability to capture it, organize it, and further monetize it—truly represented the crown jewels for publishers.

Obviously, that trend eventually caught on, as we all now more fully understand how important the effective use, storage, and reusability of content is to a publisher’s bottom line. Publishers have adopted this from a vision and business perspective—and that feels like a great leap forward. I was personally pleased to hear that phrase expressed as a core strategy at more than one publishing organization this week—wow, we are really getting there! However, the next big challenge is to shift publishing culture, organizational structures, and processes to an integrated and more symbiotic state, and to break away from the silos and kingdoms that exist around specific content channels at major publishers. Organizing content technically and systematically is just the beginning. Now we need to evolve our work methods—the way we live and breathe content within our organizations, and the way it’s used and consumed—to develop a new organizational approach.

In upcoming blog posts, we’ll be profiling some top publishers that have seen the light and made this leap. But we’d also like to hear from those of you who are trying to make the leap in organizations that haven’t. What do you see as the challenges and barriers to shifting your organization? Do you see the future of content differently based on your role and where you sit?  Please share your thoughts with us, and if you’d like us to share your success story here, please get in touch!

Are we there yet? Stay tuned; we’ll tell you more…