A fast and affordable option for publishing apps to iPad

by Rufus Deuchler

As a worldwide design evangelist at Adobe Systems, I travel the world to showcase and explain Adobe solutions to Adobe Creative Suite users, and I get to meet hundreds of designers in person. Adobe InDesign software is their tool of choice when it comes to creating beautiful layouts independently of how they will be published, and the Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) always generates great interest among designers. 

However, in the past, when the discussion moved to the costs of the service, it became difficult to convince freelance designers and small businesses to use DPS because Professional Edition and Enterprise Edition have high upfront costs. These costs make sense if you are a large media publisher and need enterprise-grade features to distribute, control, and publish your content. But if you're an independent designer or a small shop that wants to publish a training manual, a brochure, an annual report, a highly visual book, or something that will remain unchanged for a significant period of time, you need a better option. That's why Adobe created Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition.

With a one-time fee of US$395, Single Edition is a fast and affordable way to get into the digital publishing game. It is perfect for users who want a straightforward approach to publishing tablet content but don't require reader analytics, integration with back-end systems, viewer customization, advanced merchandising capabilities, or the ability to serve content privately within an organization.

How Single Edition works

Single Edition lets you create single .folio apps. For example, a .folio file can be a magazine (with a collection of articles) or a book (with a collection of chapters). Digital Publishing Suite is the tool that converts a set of InDesign documents to a single .folio file and then embeds the .folio file into an app.

To see the step-by-step digital publishing workflow, check out the following video where Adobe Evangelist Colin Fleming guides you through the process of designing and publishing a media-rich interactive document for iPad.

Once you have published your single .folio application to Apple's App Store, customers can download it (at no additional cost to you) for as long as you keep it in the App Store. You also need to let your clients and customers know when a new application is available for download from the App Store.

How to get Single Edition

Single Edition for iPad is now available for purchase at http://digitalpublishing.acrobat.com. From InDesign CS5.5, users can publish through Single Edition to iPad for US$395 per application. We expect Single Edition to support additional tablet platforms later in 2012. You can learn more about Single Edition, as well as Enterprise Edition and Professional Edition, on the Adobe website.

To see how the University of Dayton is using Digital Publishing Suite Single Edition to create an emotional connection for prospective students and faculty—bringing the sights and sounds of higher education to iPad—check out the following video.

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