Welcome to TFP’s weekly roundup of interesting and noteworthy stories from the publishing world. This week we’re discussing highlights from the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, five steps to working lean in publishing, a DPS how-to on pull-out sliders and trays, Hearst’s plans to use Amazon links in Kindle editions, and more.

• While attending the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in New York City this week, we were inspired by many of the keynote speakers. LeVar Burton’s keynote opened the conference, focusing on storytelling’s impact on innovation. Watch Burton’s presentation below, and check out the full library of recorded sessions on the TOC website.

• Drawing on Monday’s TOC sessions, TFP President Margot Knorr Mancini shared her thoughts on agile workflows, offering  five steps to working lean in publishing.
• New on Adobe TV this week, Digital Publishing Evangelist Colin Fleming shares a DPS tip about pull-out sliders and trays. This tutorial walks through how to create a scrolling frame that slides in and out of a page, revealing more information when the reader pulls on a tab. Watch the full video below.

• Hearst made headlines this week with its plan to include links to Amazon in its digital editions. When readers tap on a product highlighted in a Kindle edition of a Hearst title, they will be able to purchase that item through Amazon, with Hearst receiving a portion of the sales. In-app purchasing of consumer goods has presented a challenge for retailers and magazine publishers alike, so this move is an interesting short-term solution.
• In merger-and-acquisition news, F+W Media confirmed its joint-venture-turned-purchase of Hoffman’s Martha Pullen Co.

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.

That’s this year’s theme at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing Conference. More and more of the groups we’ve worked with in recent months have brought new challenges to us, with stricter requirements for doing more with less in a faster-paced market than we’ve ever experienced before. We’ve increasingly seen that the older, established models of large and long project plans and “clear” long-term goals no longer fit the quickly changing publishing world.

A discussion at this week’s O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference helped drive home the fact that a new age of working and thinking is upon us, and the concept of agile deployment is something that we all need to embrace to be successful in more than just development. In fact, discussions about agile methodologies are peppered throughout many of the discussions occurring at this gathering of leading-edge publishing minds, highlighted by presenter Kristen McLean of Bookigee.

So many of us have grown up in a publishing world where accuracy, fine-tuning, and perfection have been driven home as absolute necessities. Agile methodologies challenge those expectations in a way that helps publishers to embrace a new way of working that adapts to today’s market and rapidly changing demands.

Here are several concepts that support the agile model:

1) Think in terms of smaller, more attainable goals. If the goal is large, the world will have shifted under your feet before you’re done.

2) Learn as you go. Don’t plan to know it all when you start—it’s no longer realistic. You’ll get off the dime and get productive more quickly.

3) Organize small, collaborative, enabled teams that all have skin in the game and respond to the current state regularly.

4) Test new approaches or markets quickly, so you can learn and respond more quickly.

5) Set the expectation across your teams, management and customers that you will be creating, learning, testing, adjusting, and responding. They’ll see results more quickly, and so will you.

The overall lesson: Think small, act quickly, and adjust frequently. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Welcome to TFP’s weekly roundup of interesting and noteworthy stories from the publishing world. This week we’re discussing publishing CEOs’ predictions for 2012, the growing popularity of Pinterest among publishers, success for Prevention and Runner’s World, and a merger in the print and fulfillment sector.

• Digital Book World shared a video of one of the panels from its annual conference, where publishing industry CEOs discussed what they learned in 2011 and what their strategies are for the year ahead. This session is well worth watching, with F+W Media Chairman and CEO David Nussbaum moderating, and Sourcebooks CEO and Publisher Dominique Raccah and Hyperion President and Publisher Ellen Archer among the panelists.
  
• We’re hearing more and more about publishers using the virtual pinboard Pinterest. Using the up-and-coming social network for one of its more popular applications—sharing recipes—Time Inc.’s Cooking Light has been wildly successful in driving traffic to its website; Pinterest is CookingLight.com’s No. 1 social media referral source, according to Tina Imm, Time’s Lifestyle Digital Group general manager. On the news side of the publishing industry, Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal are also gaining traction and have been listed as two of the top five news organizations to follow on Pinterest.
• 2012 is off to a great start for Rodale, whose Prevention and Runner’s World titles pulled in record numbers for website traffic and social media following, respectively. Following a redesign of its website, Prevention experienced its highest-traffic month ever in January (with a 44% year-over-year increase), while Runner’s World increased its Facebook “likes” by 111% and Twitter following by 293% compared with the previous year.
• Publishers Weekly announced some big news in the publishing print and fulfillment world this week: The two best-known independent printers, Edwards Brothers and Malloy, are merging to create Edwards Brothers Malloy.

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.

Welcome to TFP’s weekly roundup of interesting and noteworthy stories from the publishing world. This week we’re discussing PePcon and InDesign Secrets Live, tablet advertising challenges, Penton Media’s new CEO, Heart and Condé Nast’s latest business deal, and the Kindle Fire’s fourth-quarter sales.

• David Blatner announced that registration is now open for the PePcon and InDesignSecrets Live conferences. PePcon is a three-day conference in San Francisco that promises to cover topics such as “Producing eBooks from InDesign: ePub and Kindle,” “InDesign to iPad and Android Apps,” “Let’s Talk Future: How to Prepare for the Next Two Years,” and “Let’s Talk PDF: Best Practices for Print Workflows.” InDesignSecrets Live is a two-day, one-track seminar in New York City presented by InDesign experts Anne-Marie Concepcion, Bob Levine, Sandee Cohen, Mike Rankin, and David Blatner.
• DPSCreate™ made it into the Staff Picks section of the Adobe Digital Publishing Gallery. Check out some of the reviews or download a copy of DPSCreate™ in the Apple App Store.
• Rob O’Regan discussed what is continually a hot topic as the popularity of tablets grows: the challenges that publishers are facing when it comes to in-app advertising.
• David Kieselstein, former CEO of TNS North America, is taking over the CEO position at Penton Media. Tyler Zachem and Anup Bagaria will step down from their interim co-CEO positions when Kieselstein officially starts on Feb. 21.
• Hearst and Condé Nast exited the magazine distribution business with the sale of their co-owned national magazine distributor CoMag, ending what many have considered a strange partnership. Canadian entrepreneur Jim Pattison is CoMag’s new owner.
• Stifel Nicolas analyst Jordan Rohan estimated  fourth-quarter sales of the Kindle Fire to be close to 6 million units. It continues to be suggested that Amazon’s profits will grow not from sales of the Kindle Fire device but through digital purchases.

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.

Welcome to TFP’s weekly roundup of interesting and noteworthy stories from the publishing world. This week we’re discussing Meredith Corp.’s new purchase, how Money magazine redesigned, NBC News’ new venture, and increases in the tablet and e-reader markets.

• In a big move, Meredith Corp. purchased top recipe website AllRecipes.com from The Reader’s Digest Association on Tuesday. According to publishing industry news site Min, the transaction is valued at $175 million. Meredith also recently purchased Every Day with Rachael Ray, Eating Well, and FamilyFun. There are no plans to combine the company’s Recipes.com with the newly acquired Allrecipes.com at this time.
• Money magazine turned 40 years old in 2012 and decided it was time for a new look. The print edition of the magazine got a complete redesign, while a tablet edition of Money entered the company’s workflow for the first time. Take a look at the process Money went through in order to redesign its print edition, and how it designed and implemented the tablet edition.
• NBC News announced the creation of NBC Publishing, a new business unit focusing on digital publishing and e-books. Hoping to take advantage of the growing tablet and e-reader market, NBC Publishing will repurpose the company’s news coverage to create e-books and digital singles.
• The holiday season was good to the tablet and e-reader markets. Nearly 29% of Americans now own either a tablet or an e-reader, whereas only 18% of Americans owned one of those devices prior to the holidays.

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.

BOLTON, Mass., Jan. 24, 2012 — Technology for Publishing™ LLC (TFP) hit the ground running in 2012, releasing DPSCreate™: Building Interactive Content on Jan. 10. DPSCreate is available as an app, a downloadable PDF handbook, or a hard-copy handbook and is the first comprehensive, self-guided learning tool for Adobe® Digital Publishing Suite™ (DPS) available to the publishing industry. For the thousands of users in organizations big and small who are anxious to take advantage of the new features offered by DPS, DPSCreate provides easily digestible information, real-world examples, and best practices essential for success in digital publishing.

DPSCreate™: Building Interactive Content covers the following digital publishing topics, and more:

• DPS terminology
• Getting started with file organization and document assembly
• Creating interactive and scrollable content
• Building and editing folios
• Sharing folios for review and approval

“DPSCreate presents all of the information a user needs to learn about DPS in one place, with tips and extras you won’t find anywhere else,” said Stephanie Brockway, Director, Creative and Digital Publishing, at Technology for Publishing. “We provide all of the necessary instructions for creating rich interactive features and building a folio file, using an easy-to-follow, intuitive teaching method.”

TFP worked closely with Adobe early in the pre-release development stages of the Digital Publishing Suite, providing insight and direction based on customer feedback. As one of the first DPS partners in the industry, TFP has been able to mesh its comprehensive industry knowledge with current market and strategic requirements to provide valuable insight and guidance to its clients as they have released their first apps, including National Geographic and Men’s Health. TFP’s hands-on experience has been captured in the DPSCreate products and will be offered in exciting partner products soon to be announced.

“We launched DPSCreate because we saw that companies and designers were eager to know how to create publications on the iPad. When Adobe Digital Publishing Suite was released, there was no easy way for designers to learn about the process of creating an interactive publication. We developed DPSCreate to demystify the process and empower designers—and companies—to succeed in the tablet publishing market,” said Brockway.

About Technology for Publishing

Technology for Publishing™ LLC is a publishing consulting firm that has been providing process and technical consulting to publishers in the magazine, book, newspaper, and corporate industries 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 from traditional, resource-heavy, paper-based models to fluid, automated content flows.

For more information, please contact us.

• The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) caused a major stir in the media this week. The bill, currently being considered by Congress, would prevent access to certain websites, search engine results, and domain names, in what some feel would be an act of censorship. What does this have to do with the magazine industry? Audience Development outlined what magazine publishers need to know about SOPA.
• After a swirl of rumors earlier in the week, on Thursday Apple unveiled iBooks 2, a potentially ground-breaking product that allows individuals without design or coding skills to produce interactive e-books (including textbooks). You can take a closer look at iBooks 2 in the App Store.
• Building a better app has been a hot topic lately in the publishing app world. This week, Adobe offered its perspective in a post on the Adobe Digital Publishing blog.
• Mashable shared its take on the five digital publishing app trends to watch in 2012. Trend #4, the digital textbook, certainly looks positioned to take off this year.
• Are you an InDesign enthusiast? Check out This Week in InDesign for a thorough roundup of InDesign links and tips.
• The past few months have been rife with stories about experimental content strategies, including Ladies’ Home Journal, which recently announced plans to utilize content written by readers. Rob O’Regan just shared a post on the eMedia Vitals blog about the six benefits of using user-generated content.

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.

• At TFP, we launched our new iPad app, DPSCreate™, a handy app-guide for using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. It’s available now on iTunes.
• A big congratulations goes out to all Technology for Publishing clients who made the recently released list of top-grossing Apple iTunes Newsstand apps. TFP is proud to have had the honor to help five of the top 20 on the list with planning and launch!
  
• USA Today reported a post-holiday e-book surge that it attributes to e-reader gift-giving. On its most recent bestseller list, all of the top-10 titles, and 32 of the top 50, sold more copies in digital format than in print. A list of titles along with a comparison of print versus electronic sales can be found on paidContent.org.
• iMonitor reports that nearly half of digital magazine apps have significant malfunctions. The biggest issue is subscription authentication for publications offering digital access to print subscribers.
• Each year, an overwhelming number of new technologies are introduced at the International Consumer Electronics Show. This year’s show, the second largest in its history, is no exception. To see how these technologies could affect publishers, see Mashable’s list of five gadgets that are ideal for journalists and Rob O’Regan’s blog post on products that might influence your publishing strategies.

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.

DPSCreate™ Tip #1: Folio Builder Flattening
Did you know that in the Adobe DPS folio-building process, the Folio Builder flattens all non-interactive content to either a 72 ppi JPG or PNG file? If a page predominantly contains images (raster), it will be flattened to a JPEG. If a page predominantly contains text or flat color (vector), it is flattened to a PNG. Knowing this in advance of creating images for your tablet edition will save on storage space while you’re working, and it will also save on bundling time.

DPSCreate™ Tip #2: Video Overlays
Optimize your video overlays by resampling your video content to its intended target size on the page. Tapping anywhere within the video frame will play the video; creating a Play button is not required. This approach allows the frame to be larger or smaller depending on your design needs, while still allowing the video to play at target size. The InDesign Selection tool and Direct Selection tool allow you to reposition the video frame or the content as you would any image content.

DPSCreate™ Tip #3: DPS Naming Best Practices
To help keep track of multiple DPS hyperlinks, slideshow objects, and buttons, use content-specific names to organize your objects. By default, InDesign will apply generic names, such as Button 1, Button 2, etc. Changing these names to reflect the actual content and state will make it easier to track and update buttons, especially with complicated interactives.

DPSCreate™ Tip #4: PDF Pinch and Zoom
DPS PDF Pinch and Zoom is a great enhancement that’s set on an article-by-article basis to enable users to zoom in on pages. When creating pages to take advantage of Pinch and Zoom, save images at 96ppi rather than the usual 72 ppi to maximize the viewing resolution when zooming.

DPSCreate™ Tip #5: Optimizing Images
Placing high-resolution image files into an InDesign tablet layout can result in folio-building errors, as well as network slowdowns and inflated disk space. When a folio is built, any images that are not interactive will be downsampled to the target resolution of the device — 72 ppi. So plan ahead and save a set of downsampled images to place in your layouts as you build your folio.
5 Recommended Specs for Static Images:
1.    File format: JPEG
2.    Resolution: 72 ppi, saved with the “Resample Image” option checked
3.    Quality (in the Image Options dialog box): Maximum (10)
4.    Color space: RGB
5.    Maximum dimensions: 2000 x 2000 pixels

DPSCreate™ Tip #6: Creating a Workspace
To optimize your work habits and provide quick access to tools, create a DPS-specific workspace that contains the following panels: Hyperlinks, Media, Object States, Buttons, Folio Builder, and Overlay Creator. This will help you pull up all of the tools you need, organized the way you want them, whenever you’re ready to work on a DPS project.

DPSCreate™ Tip #7: Smooth Scrolling Pages in Horizontal Format
To add a longer-depth page to a horizontal format folio, use the Import command in the Article View of the Folio Builder panel. Do not use the Add command, as it will add a vertical page instead of maintaining the horizontal format and will not display properly.

DPSCreate™ Tip #8: Poster Images
In the DPS tools, a poster image is a static image that serves as a placeholder until a slideshow, image sequence, or other interactive content is played. Custom poster images can be created with instructions or icons for interacting with content. DPS can use poster images for videos, audio controller skins, and web content.

DPSCreate™ Tip #9: Scrollable Frames
You can now include interactive overlays (except slideshows, for now) in a scrollable frame using the Pan & Zoom “Pan Only” function. For more details on how to use this new feature, click here.

DPSCreate™ Tip #10: DPS TOC Preview Icons
When DPS files are viewed on the tablet interface, or “chrome,” a TOC icon is displayed in the upper left corner. By default, DPS renders this from the article’s first-page content. To create custom thumbnails for this list view, create a 70 x 70 pixel PNG file. Using the Article properties dialog box in the Folio Builder panel, select the custom TOC image to go along with each article.

DPSCreate™ Tip #11: Scrollbars
When creating DPS pages, leave a 6-pixel margin on the right edge of all pages for the tablet scrollbar. You can do this by placing a guide or page object such as a black bar to allow for this space.

DPSCreate Bonus Tip #12: Get up and running by creating your own app in no time with our new DPSCreate™ handbook and iPad app!

Available now on the TFP Products Page.

• Meredith Corp. is expanding its stable of brands, which already includes Parents and American Baby magazines, through its acquisition of Disney’s FamilyFun magazine. This is Meredith’s third major purchase in seven months, following the acquisition of Eating Well last June and Every Day with Rachael Ray in October. Meredith will get FamilyFun‘s print and digital magazines, along with the ToyHopper app. “This acquisition further strengthens our leadership position and reach among women in both the parenthood and food spaces, and offers our advertisers additional channels to reach these consumers,” says Tom Harty, Meredith’s national media group president.
• Rumors have been swirling about Apple’s plans for a media event that will be held in New York City later this month. There’s been much speculation about what Apple will be addressing, including the possibilities of news related to its iBookstore and/or advertising. We’ll have to wait and see!
• USA Today launched a custom app for Kindle Fire as part of its mobile strategy to be first news source on emerging technologies. According to a press release, the app “features a custom look and design specifically for the tablet with the signature content readers have come to trust from USA Today.”
• The U.K.’s Guardian newspaper announced that its iPad edition now includes Weekend magazine. According to its blog, the iPad app has been downloaded more than 500,000 times since it launched in October.