WoodWing World Tour – Tablet Publishing

Today’s WoodWing World Tour in Sydney, featuring Tablet Publishing was simply inspiring.

Hans Janssen (CEO WoodWing Software) opened with his keynote “Best of Times!”, giving us a peak into WoodWing’s history,  strategy and tablet trending, that really indicated to the audience that tablet publishing = opportunity.

• We saw the world premiere of the WoodWing promo video.

Food for thought from Hans’ session:

• It’s expected that by 2013, 60-million tablet devices will have been sold worldwide. With a prognosis like that we simply can’t ignore tablet publishing.
• Currently it seems that iOS users (iPhone, iPod, iPad) are more willing to purchase Apps than other users – this makes the iOS platform a platform of opportunity.
• The growing market is corporate and there’s a need for publishing software in this market.
• With tablet devices proving to be lean-back devices – devices that are used more often at home in the evening hours and over the weekend – there is a new opportunity for advertising.

WoodWing’s digital magazine tools, provide the ability for organisations to set-up a publishing workflow that doesn’t necessarily require software development. Adobe InDesign (and InCopy) continue to be the design and editing tools of choice within the WoodWing environment. Their solution removes the ‘second issue’ problem App developers encounter by providing a workflow that enables repeat publishing.

Erik Schut (President WoodWing Software) continued with a keynote on Enterprise 7 and the iPad.88 Apps, have published over 750 issues, clearly indicating that the ‘second issue’ problem does not exist when using WoodWing’s digital magazine tools. Erik also pointed to the fact that in the near future, with the expected launch of Adobe’s digital publishing platform, there will be two choices on the Apps side of things. There will be differences in the concepts each choice uses and WoodWing will continue to deliver support for Adobe InDesign’s layout abilities within its solutions. Adobe Digital Publishing Platform is fully integrated into Enterprise 7.2, so publishers can take advantage of the WoodWing workflow efficiency.

Some differences:

• WoodWing’s solution is software licensed and a customisable App.
• Adobe is expected to use a ‘pay per download’ solution and standard approach.

Enterprise 7.3  is expected to be released before the end of the year. Digital Magazine Tools 1.7 will add:

• Newsfeed publisher, so you can have a feeds based publication
• HTML5 reader, which allows viewing within the web browser.
• Multiscreen view ports, which allow the use of a single layout designed for different aspect ratios, as would be required for different tablet devices.
• Progressive downloads
• Local and global searching as well as bookmarking

Alan Oakley (Group Executive Editor (Digital) for News Limited), gave an excellent keynote on ‘Tablets as a game-changer” well thought-out, anecdotal, filled with great quotes. He’s a self-confessed ‘non-techno’-person, but loves his iPad… it only has 4-buttons . A few of the quotes that I really loved:

• “the iPad is absolutely a game changer. It presents a new opportunity for newspapers” – Mario Garcia
• People with strange new job titles are revolutionizing publishing…
• “we live in an irregular world, where irregular people take advantage of irregular events and use irregular means to produce irregular products that yield irregular profits” – Gary Hamel, Bill Green (correct source?)
• Design for the eye, the finger and the brain – Mario Garcia
• It is time for exploration, not time to sit on the sideline and see what everyone else is doing.

29-Nov-2010: Alan’s published an extract of his keynote in the Australian.

Adobe’s Product Marketing Manager for Creative Solutions, Michael Stoddart followed with a keynote on “Maintaining your Brand by Design”.  Michael used a great analogy to place where we are at with tablet publishing, by showing us how a known newspaper web-site design had developed since 1997. He focussed on the role of the designer in building rich, highly designed and engaging experiences.

Magazines on tablet devices are as recognisable by their brand as the magazines we’ve seen throughout the years at our newsagent’s magazine stands. Design, font-usage, use of white or colour space… Who doesn’t remember the look of the National Geographic cover for instance?  Many web-sites that aggregate news have similar look and feels, with content drawn from content management systems and lack this brand-identity.

The reason we’re looking at digital magazine designs and deliveries, is ‘content monetisation’.

Victor Cardoso (Woodwing Evangelist), gave us a demo of Enterprise 7, and the afternoon was filled with different tracks. I enjoyed the iPad publishing case studies for newspapers delivered by Andrew Lomas (Creative Folks) and John Fong (Serious Tec). Andrew also announced the alliance between Serious and Creative Folk under the new “Smart Alliance” name . Fraser Crozier (Pacific Magazines), spoke about the need for a workflow and change management. For the last session of the day that I attended, Dennis de Nooij (Product Manager, Woodwing Software), showed us some of the crazy cool apps developed with Woodwing tools and provided us with some sneak peeks of Magazine Tools 1.7.

The WoodWing World Tour – Sydney event was a great success.

It is an exciting time to be involved in publishing. Be it newspaper, magazine or book publishing. I wish I had a crystal ball and could look ahead at what else the future has in store for the publishing industry, be it in device developments, software enhancements or and workflow efficiency.

23-November: You can now download the World Tour Stop in Sydney – Presentation slides from WoodWing’s Community site.