“Content [plus experience] is now king,” says Adobe, in their announcement of an upcoming “open, comprehensive Digital Publishing Platform.”

I’ve been following this because the potential is immense. Like Adobe Acrobat PDFs for every form of media… App-independent!?! Platform-independent?!? Wow!!

My job with Webucator is to look down the road, stay on top of what’s upcoming, and develop courseware that’s relevant. But it’s kind of tough when Adobe’s digital publishing and content viewer apps have yet to be released. Webucator is planning on rolling out some app development courses for the iPhone and iPad anyway, but now Adobe is promising to cut through all that Objective-C programming mumbo-jumbo by delivering software that integrates seamlessly with Adobe InDesign and CS5, fits into the normal workflow of publishers and creative agencies, and is platform-independent, sort of…

The idea is that the publication goes through design and production once, and then is rendered in different versions, for different platforms. Publishers will not be forced to hire a slew of Objective-C programmers to enter the iPad arena, and designers won’t be forced to become programmers. Maybe most significantly, publishers will not be forced to choose iPad over Kindle—they’ll be able to release editions for both, without a lot of extra programming and development. Magazines will be published with their own viewers for whatever platform, generated directly from Adobe InDesign CS5.

This is a pretty big deal for entire industries, not just designers and app developers, and this is where business is going, I think… (at least until the eReader rubble has settled.)  It’s like the promise of XML/XSLT on steroids… But how’s it all going to work?

Here’s one independent article that explains it pretty well.

So, back to my opening line, the user experience (on the iPad anyway) is very cool. You can navigate through a magazine or a book just like you use an app on the iPhone or iPad, with interactive video throughout. Check out this video on Adobe.tv, which demos how you can move through a WIRED digital magazine publication on the iPad.

The digital magazine was created, of course, with InDesign CS5 and yet-to-be-released “new Adobe Digital Publishing technologies.”  The video is impressive, but it only shows the experience on the iPad.  It doesn’t show how the same publication would look on the some other viewer, like the Kindle, which only supports video in its iPad and iPhone editions. WIRED chose the iPad for obvious reasons, like the color display, for their first digital edition—they’re the Betas, so they can.

Adobe is supposed to release this stuff late this summer, but they haven’t yet. There’s not much out there, as far as the nuts and bolts goes. Adobe says they’re going to release it as soon as it’s finished, and not hold back with last-minute tweaks as they want to “get the solution in the hands of the customer as soon as possible.” I guess they’re going to tweak it later… (?)

Well, Apple does that too, right?

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If you’d like to learn more about Adobe InDesign and the digital publishing revolution, check out my Introduction to InDesign CS5 training and Advanced InDesign classes.