Digital Publishing Suite overview

Adobe Digital Publishing Suite is a complete solution that lets individual designers, traditional media publishers, ad agencies, and major media and brand organizations create, distribute, monetize, and optimize cutting-edge interactive content and publications for tablet devices. In this article, you will get an overview of Digital Publishing Suite and understand the differences among the different editions of the solution that are available.

Individual designers, as well as corporate and enterprise publishers, can now use the new online publishing services of Digital Publishing Suite in combination with Adobe InDesign® to design, publish, monetize, and optimize cutting-edge interactive content and publications for tablet devices. Create brochures, catalogs, portfolios, training materials, annual reports, and engaging custom books. Design a new class of innovative, feature-rich digital magazines and newspapers similar to WIRED, The New Yorker, Martha Stewart Living, Bonnier-DN, and iGIZMO, for reading on the Apple iPad, Android^TM, and Amazon Kindle Fire tablets.

Adobe Digital Publishing Suite includes services that, used in combination with Adobe InDesign, provide a complete workflow that enables the efficient design and distribution of apps for tablets. Bring a document to life by adding interactive content to an Adobe InDesign file with the Overlay Creator Panel. Use the Folio Builder panel to create folio files, which combine multiple articles into a publication. Then, use the Viewer Builder Service to create a custom app to be distributed through a digital marketplace.

With Digital Publishing Suite, you can*:

• Engage readers: Create and publish exciting apps using familiar Adobe Creative Suite® 5.5 software in combination with Digital Publishing Suite. Draw on your imagination to develop tablet content that combines the easy readability of print with exciting new elements, including video and high-quality sound, animation, panoramas, image sequences, and other interactive features.
• Extend market reach: Provide engaging, publisher-branded reading experiences on an array of mobile devices, including Apple iPad, Android, and Amazon Kindle Fire tablets—enabling you to acquire new readers in markets around the world.
• Merchandise: Use flexible commerce models to sell single issues and subscriptions through mobile marketplaces such as the Apple App Store, Android Market, and Kindle Fire Newsstand. Leverage entitlement capabilities to provide customers with access to digital content based on existing print or digital subscriptions to build your digital readership quickly. Integrate custom storefronts within your apps to merchandise other products, and turn readers into consumers.
• Drive greater customer and business insights: Analyze your editorial content and boost advertising revenue with robust analytics, based on Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, which allow you to better understand reader behavior and content interests—much more quickly than using traditional survey instruments and focus groups.
• Generate increased advertising revenue: Drive greater advertising CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) through support for rich media and interactive ads that encourage consumers to engage with brands in new and inventive ways.

* Features available depend on the edition of Digital Publishing Suite. See following pages for details.

In Adobe InDesign®, designers and publishers can author publications targeted to tablet devices using the new Folio Producer tools. You can create immersive page layouts that combine the visual appeal of print with the engagement of interactivity. Within InDesign, you can add interactive overlays to page layouts to enable functionality such as hyperlinks, slide shows, image sequences, audio and video, image panoramas, web content, and pan and zoom. InDesign packages your tablet content as .folio files ("issues"), which can have multiple articles within them.

The Folio Producer Service helps you organize, edit, and publish .folio files, while the Viewer Builder Service allows you to create a custom viewer app that runs on Apple iPad, Amazon Kindle Fire and other Android^TM based tablets. Your viewer app can include single .folio files, multiple .folio files, or subscription-based content.

The Distribution Service and e-commerce support enable you to distribute your apps through leading mobile marketplaces including the Apple App Store, Amazon Kindle Fire Newsstand, and Android Market. In apps that include a single .folio, the entire app and its content are hosted by the app store/marketplace. For apps that include multiple .folios or utilize subscriptions, the viewer app is hosted by the marketplace, but the actual content is hosted by Adobe and downloaded into the app.

The Analytics Service enables you to gain insight into how your readers and customers engage with editorial and advertising content through tight integration with Adobe Online Marketing Suite.

There are three editions of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite:

• Single Edition provides small to midsize design studios and freelance designers an intuitive and affordable way to deliver iPad apps such as brochures, portfolios, and highly visual books, without writing code or relying on developers.
• Professional Edition is an off-the-shelf tablet publishing solution that provides an immediate option for quickly publishing, monetizing, and analyzing content consumed on tablet devices.
• Enterprise Edition is a custom-tailored solution that can be built to meet the needs of large organizations. It is fully extensible, allowing publishers to integrate the Digital Publishing Suite with the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, existing back-end editorial publishing platforms, and third-party print subscription systems. Additional functionality available through the Enterprise Edition is noted in Table 1.

Table 1. Compare Digital Publishing Suite editions

Read the article Digital Publishing Suite: Three Editions for a detailed breakdown of the capabilities and features of each editions.

For more information, try these resources:

• Adobe Digital Publishing Suite pricing information for each edition and how to buy
• Adobe Digital Publishing Suite reseller partners who can provide comprehensive consulting, training, and workflow implementation services