Quark Acquires PressRun

Mike Rankin

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In business, there are two ways to grow your company with new technology: you can build it or you can buy it. In the digital publishing realm, Adobe has chosen the first approach, creating their Digital Publishing Suite tools from scratch. Today Quark showed that they’re taking the second approach, announcing the acquisition of Mobile IQ, one of the leading companies in the growing digital publishing solutions market.

Mobile IQ is the producer of PressRun, a cloud-based solution for publishing magazines, newspapers, catalogs, and journals to tablets and other mobile devices. PressRun allows publishers to use InDesign documents, XML, PDF, or HTML content to publish apps for iOS and Android devices. The apps PressRun creates are HTML-based, so the text is fully searchable, and the file sizes of the apps are relatively small, allowing users to download issues faster, and store more content on their mobile devices. You can also add many kinds of interactivity to documents with PressRun via slideshows, video, audio, animation, Flash, 360º images, and more. Like Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite, PressRun comes in three versions for small, medium, and large publishers.

You might well be wondering if the acquisition by Quark means that PressRun will no longer support content coming from InDesign. Not so, according to the press release. "Mobile IQ’s PressRun solution for tablet publishing will continue to support multiple content creation formats, including HTML5, XML, and InDesign."

For Quark, the acquisition means they now control one of the leading digital publishing solutions, and can offer publishers (even those using InDesign) an alternative to Adobe’s DPS. For Mobile IQ, this news represents an opportunity to enter into new, larger markets like financial services, manufacturing, and government.