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• • April 22, 2010 at 5:57 am #55549
    Colin Flashman

    Member

    g'day there.

    I've been involved in prepress and printing for over ten years and am involved in the preparation of everything from business cards to large catalogues. Recently, several customers have been asking more and more questions concerning epubs, e-readers… essentially moving their media from print to on-screen. The normal answer is PDF, but now with the plethora of e-readers available, production costs of printed products, the verge of the release of html5, the introduction of the ipad, and the fact that on-screen doesn't just mean colour but motion and feedback too, i'm wondering whether PDF is the right answer anymore? I'll admit to being rather ignorant on the subject, never having touched nor seen an e-reader, and being reluctant to change my ways from preparing artwork in Indesign and exporting it to PDF… but are these days numbered?

    One situation in particular involved a client frustrated with production costs and warehousing of printed products and considered using indesign to make pdfs for online material. However, the client is concerned about piracy of the content and the usefulness when in the hands of the customer. My opinion was not to use the indesign/pdf options at all and to use more html or flash driven media.

    On that note, my questions to the readers of this post are:

    1) when faced with the question “We want to put our print content into an on-screen media” what are the answers normally offered?

    2) have any customers actually asked the above question of your business?

    3) are purely print businesses considering becoming more “content” businesses offering not the typical web design, but rather solutions to shifting print content to on-screen? and if so, where is the line drawn – interactive PDFs, fully functional websites, apps for iphones/ipads, etc? and finally, how hard was the learning curve?

    Print certainly has its place, and certain aspects of print won't be replaced by on-screen, such as point of sale marketing; cartons and labels, displays etc… but in my opinion on-screen has the ability to not just be a trend, but replace certain elements of print media. Newspapers and periodicals which may be losing revenue from advertising, subscriptions and sales of their products would do better in an on-screen environment where the content is not only colour, but moving and making sounds, and also being interactive and the way i want to view it… (provided i buy the app for the ipad: sports illustrated and the new york times on the ipad being two cases in point). Similarly, the last time I used my phone book was to clean my paint rollers and squash a spider, and their site online gives a more precise search compared to reading that boat-anchor… wouldn't doing away with the phone book not only save the publisher a ton of money in terms of production costs; but also be better for the environment?

    What do others think about this issue?

  • April 22, 2010 at 6:16 am #55550
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    From what I see not everyone is going to have an iPad, e-reader or even a computer capable – so it means

    having a print copy ready

    Having an e-pub ready

    Having a PDF ready

    Having interactive PDFs ready

    Having a Flash version ready

    It's a bit ridiculous if you ask me. Not everyone has an e-reader and PDFs can containg movement – especially if you make them through indesign – apparently exporting your Animimations to SWF and placing them back in the layout can generate interactive movind PDFs

    From where I'm working – I know a lot of people that won't print out a PDF that's online they much prefer we post the form to them and they post it back – go figure?

    I send Flash files to co-workers for review – but their computer doesn't have Flash player installed… and I know from experience of making Flash available on our site that there were complaints because some people didn't have Flash installed and didn't want to either with the “Why should I install something that I should just be able to read?”

    I don't know how HTML5 is going to tie into this demanding workflow being presented to print and web designers. Taking something from Indesign to republish in another format is tedious work – even going to the XML workflow – in my humble opinion.

    We hired some guys to come in and they are the XML experts and they said even our 100 page full colour magazine would be to complex to XML and repurpose for the Web.

    It was at this stage I looked into page-flip.com (flipping book) that allowed a PDF to be converted to a Flipping Book using flash and generating the files and the html 5.

    fantastic – it works – and I just hope that I can include some interactive stuff this way too within the pdf and it's converted to the flipping book – one can only dream. But I won't know until CS5 arrives.

    Honestly – it would be more pleasant if there was a really good InDesign to iPad button or InDesign to HTML 5 button. But of course it's not that easy, is it?

    Any time I tell the people I work with – “Oh I'll make that Epub for you” they say “no it's ok we got this crowd to do it”. So I've never gotten the chance really to take our files and make epubs from them or try them out on the iphone/ipad/e-readers – very disappointing for me.

    For me – going from a pure print and prepress workflow to an interactive workflow with ipads and ereaders and html5 and all that jazz is just too complex at the moment. And where I work they are hiring outside companies to make the conversions for them.

    Heck with 15 publications of 1,000 to 3,200 pages ranging, I haven't even made an Index yet – that's still being outsourced!

    That's just my take on it at the moment. But the iPad hasn't been released here yet – and I'm sure the questions will start popping up.

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