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…and publish in the morning. An in-depth look at the available tablet apps.

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad in 2010, he demonstrated the new Wired magazine app, which was created with InDesign and an early version of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite (DPS). Publishers large and small rushed to create digital content for the iPad, eagerly anticipating huge consumer demand for the chance to read graphically rich, interactive content on these shiny new devices.

DPS quickly established itself as a market leader, at least in part because it is an Adobe product. But competitors such as App Studio, Aquafadas, Mag+, and Twixl Publisher quickly came along to fill niches, workflows, and price points that DPS didn’t address. All of these solutions are the same in one respect: they allow non-programmers to create rich, interactive content with pixel-perfect precision using InDesign. These solutions also provide tools to help build an app to house your content, and a delivery system to publish content into the finished app.

Now, five years later, where are we at? Instead of coalescing into a single, best-practice solution, as many of us expected, the publishing landscape on mobile devices is still highly fragmented. There continues to be great debate over whether one should publish digital content as a mobile-friendly website, reflowable EPUB, fixed layout EPUB, PDF, or as a native app. Should there be open standards? Should different types of content be delivered using different types of output? What about accessibility? Unfortunately, the experts, and the market, don’t agree on answers to these and many other questions.

For the purposes of this article, let’s assume that you’ve decided that the best solution for your needs is to publish your content into a native app (rather than another solution such as PDF, EPUB, FXL, or a website). Which solution should you use? Which solution incorporates the best technology? Which is the best value? Which supports the widest range of interactivity? Which is best for small publishers? 

My goal is to try to answer as many of these questions as I can. This is not intended to be a comprehensive “white paper” comparing all the details of each solution. Instead, I’ll give my opinions about the strengths and weaknesses of each solution, beginning with DPS, and then five more solutions in alphabetical order. All six of these solutions offer free trials, so my advice is to narrow your selection down to a couple of solutions, and then try them both out. Research is great, but there is no substitute for actually using a product to determine if it is a good fit for your needs.

Adobe DPS

In July of this year, Adobe once again shook up the tablet-app landscape by introducing a shiny new version of DPS…along with a subtle name change. DPS now stands for Adobe Digital Publishing Solution (not Suite), aka DPS 2015. As of this writing, the new DPS is completely different than its competitors, due to its emphasis on “article-based” publishing and dynamic “browse pages.”

Article-based publishing

Adobe believes that today’s mobile device users don’t want to wait a month or more for an entire “issue” of content—and that users are better served by a continual stream of individual articles or other small content “chunks,” served frequently, like a blog. They claim that this will lead to greater retention of readers and keep readers engaged with your brand. The entire workflow of DPS is built around easily publishing individual “articles” on a frequent basis (Figure 1). These articles can be arranged in “collections” by theme, date, product, or any other criteria you specify.

Figure 1: Published articles listed in the DPS portal.

Dynamic browse pages

DPS displays an image representing each article as a “card” arranged on a grid-like “browse page.” These cards and the grid configuration of the browse pages can be highly customized (Figure 2); they can be changed at any time without needing to update the app itself.

Figure 2: The DPS Layout Properties screen is used to specify the appearance of a browse page grid.

So now, instead of just a single, static “library” or “storefront” view of your content, you can display articles, collections of articles, and banner artwork in an attractive, easily customized grid within your app, which can be changed as your needs evolve (Figure 3). As a bonus, this grid arrangement is responsive, fluidly adapting to multiple screen sizes and aspect ratios.

Figure 3: A browse page created with DPS 2015.

“Rules” determine the type of card that is used to display each article image. For example, articles that you tag as “featured” could appear with large cards, and normal articles with small cards.

Though somewhat complex to set up, once cards, rules, layouts, and collections are in place, it is quick and easy to publish a steady stream of articles into the app.

In the new world of DPS 2015, “issues” or “folios” of content can still be mixed in with this article content, if you prefer. In addition, Adobe still offers the older DPS 2014 for use by customers who prefer that platform.

Content for DPS 2015 apps can be a mix of articles created with InDesign CS6 or later, HTML content from tools such as Dreamweaver or Muse, or HTML content created from a content management system (CMS) such as Adobe Experience Manager, WordPress, or Drupal.

Another strength of Adobe DPS is support for “entitlement” with the leading subscription management companies. If you use CDS Global, Time Customer Service, Palm Coast Data, Dovetail, or Hallmark Data Systems to manage a subscriber list, these companies have pre-built connections to DPS to make it relatively easy to offer paid subscriptions in your DPS app.

DPS is the only solution reviewed here that outputs apps for Windows 8.1–10 devices. However, it does not build apps for Amazon devices. DPS 2015 just became available at the end of July, and it remains a work in progress. It will be interesting to see if any of Adobe’s competitors follow suit with similar approaches in their digital publishing products.

Pricing

The pricing of DPS 2015 is not published anywhere on Adobe.com. It is subscription-based, with an entry price starting in the range of $17,000 per year. It is clearly oriented towards mid-size to large accounts publishing periodicals or sales tools.

You can view a gallery of apps that have been created with Adobe Digital Publishing Solution at adobe.ly/1Lu3GBi.

App Studio

App Studio is owned by Quark. Yes, Quark! But, surprisingly, content for App Studio can be authored in InDesign.

App Studio is very different than its competitors. It converts InDesign content into App Studio content using HTML5 as the underlying screen technology. To do this, it needs to “squeeze” all the typographic and layout richness of InDesign into the simpler container of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The first thing you will notice when learning how to create content for App Studio is the long list of “don’ts,” such as no hyphenation, no justified text, no kerning, tracking, baseline shift, text wrap, snap-to-baseline grid, vector graphics in interactive content (other than rectangles), rotation, or flipping of page items, CMYK swatches, or content on master pages (Figure 4).  

Figure 4: The App Studio Exporter panel contains a validation feature that alerts the user to page elements that don’t meet the strict criteria required by App Studio.

One big benefit of using HTML5 as the underlying format for the output is that it gives you fully selectable and searchable text within the app. Quark also claims that it results in smaller file sizes.

App Studio’s many constraints certainly make it more challenging to convert print-based materials to digital content for an app. This solution is probably best suited for highly repetitive, templated publications. They seem to have a lot of medical journals on their customer list, which are probably a good fit.

Pricing

You can view a gallery of apps that have been created with App Studio at www.appstudio.net/en/Clients/.

Aquafadas AVE Mag

Aquafadas is a French company, part of Rakuten, a Japanese e-commerce company based in Tokyo. Rakuten also owns Kobo, a Canadian e-book reader company. According to Wikipedia, Rakuten had 2014 revenues of about $5 billion USD (more than Adobe).

Aquafadas produces a complete ecosystem of tools to create AVE (Adaptive Viewing Experience) files. These include AVE Mag, AVE PDF, AVE Reflow, and AVE Comics. AVE Mag is the solution for creating interactive mobile app content from InDesign.

Aquafadas includes a large set of interactive enhancement widgets with AVE Mag, and several more are available for purchase for an extra fee. These include some unique interactive elements such as mazes, games, and puzzles (Figure 5). In addition, the Animation and Timing panels in InDesign are partially supported by Aquafadas. This support for a broad range of interactivity makes Aquafadas particularly appealing for app content that is targeted to children or the education market.

Figure 5: The AVE Interactivity panel lists the different types of interactivity that can be created in InDesign for Aquafadas AVE Mag.

Content created with Aquafadas contains a very nice parallax effect that is applied to page elements automatically. This effect provides an interesting transition as the user swipes from one screen of content to the next. None of the other solutions offer anything like this. If you don’t like the parallax effect, it can be turned off (Figure 6).

Aquafadas provides a full text search that highlights the exact word or phrase that the user is searching for. Of the solutions reviewed here, only App Studio, Aquafadas, and in5 provide a robust search.

Pricing

See bit.ly/1EV1HQl for complete pricing info.

You can view a gallery of apps that have been created with Aquafadas solutions at bit.ly/1UDZLUT.

“Roll your own app” with in5

Like the other solutions described in this article, Ajar Productions’ in5 lets you create rich interactive content from InDesign. Unlike the other solutions, it offers no app-building, subscription, or e-commerce tools. Instead, the sole purpose of in5 is to output your interactive content as a folder of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with appearance preserved and full interactivity. Then you can add this output to a website, or use tools and services such as PhoneGap Build (free with a Creative Cloud subscription), Baker Framework, or Liquid State to build an app to house the in5-generated content.

in5 has many options to control exactly how the HTML is output. Pages can be rendered with text converted to images (for pixel-perfect precision), with text formatted with embedded fonts, or with text converted to SVG. The HTML can be output in standard web format, configured in the HPUB format for Baker Framework, structured properly for inclusion in Liquid State, or as various flavors of “web apps” (Figure 7).

Figure 7: in5 offers many options for exactly how the exported HTML should be configured.

in5 converts complex InDesign layouts to HTML pages with perfect fidelity if text is converted to images, and with really good fidelity, preserving many layout features, if text is included with embedded fonts.

Almost all the native InDesign and DPS interactive elements are supported. This includes full support for the Animation and Timing panels and interactive form elements. In fact, because Adobe DPS doesn’t support the Animation and Timing panels, in5 has a feature specifically for DPS users that exports a selected animation in HTML format ready to use in DPS.

For those on tight budgets, in5 may be the only way to get into the app game, as it is by far the least expensive of all these solutions to create interactive, graphically rich content for distribution on mobile devices and websites.

Pricing

Unlike all the other solutions in this article, in5 is software with a perpetual license per seat, not a monthly or yearly subscription.

See bit.ly/1Hsu6E4 for complete pricing info.

For more information about in5, see the review in issue 54 of InDesign Magazine. 

Two good examples of web experiences created from InDesign using in5 can be viewed at bit.ly/1UBRnud and bit.ly/1RuMjSB.

Mag+

Mag+ is owned by Bonnier AB, the Swedish parent company of Bonnier Corp. Bonnier Corp. publishes Popular Science, Popular Photography, Field & Stream, and many other magazines. Mag+ was originally developed as a custom solution for Popular Science magazine, and soon after, a separate company was formed to market the solution to other publishers.

Curiously, in July 2014, Bonnier Corp. announced that they would begin using Adobe DPS instead of Mag+ for its U.S. magazine titles  (see bit.ly/1LhtD6d). Mag+ seems to be repositioning itself as a solution for corporate communications, sales enablement, and other uses outside of consumer magazines.

The early issues of Popular Science on the iPad featured a unique user experience that consisted of long scrolling screens. As the user swiped up and down through a long screen to read a lengthy column of text, the background image would change as certain breakpoints were encountered in the long vertical screen. The entire Mag+ product was engineered to make this type of user experience easy to create. Mag+ also adds some “pinning” capability that makes it fairly easy to create dual-orientation content (Figure 8). 

The question is, do readers actually want this type of long scrolling page experience? I find publications that use this type of navigation to be wearisome to read and difficult to navigate. I also find that most people no longer care about content being dual-orientation.

If long, scrolling pages of the type offered by Mag+ are key to your publishing strategy, then this is the solution for you. Mag+ is also very capable of creating more conventional “snapping page” types of screens, but the process is more complex in Mag+ than in its competitors. Overall, I found Mag+ to be the most difficult to learn and use of all the products discussed in this article.

On the other hand, there is a substantial payoff for your efforts. The app “chrome” or user interface that is created automatically for the user by Mag+ is, in my opinion, the nicest of any of these solutions. Clear yet subtle icons indicating progress through the publication appear at the top of the screen when a user swipes horizontally, and small icons appear on the left of the screen when the user swipes vertically between screens. A very nice “page scrubber” appears across the bottom when a user taps in the middle of the screen. These are the clearest automatic navigation and wayfinding guides of any of the solutions.

You can view a gallery of apps that have been created with Mag+ at www.magplus.com/clients/.

Pricing

See bit.ly/1HslYn7 for complete pricing info.

Twixl Publisher

Twixl Publisher is definitely the third party solution most similar to Adobe DPS 2014. Anyone who has used DPS 2014 will be able to learn how to create interactive content with Twixl Publisher very quickly. In many ways, Twixl Publisher is a twin of DPS 2014, but at a very different price point.

Twixl Publisher has the easiest-to-learn and easiest-to-use interface of any of the solutions. A single panel in InDesign contains all the options necessary for interacting with Twixl Publisher. When it comes to sharing an article or an issue with others for proofing or approval, Twixl makes it extremely simple—so much easier than Adobe DPS or any of the other solutions in this important, frequent task (Figure 9).

Figure 9: A single InDesign panel contains all the options needed to create Twixl Publisher content with InDesign.

Twixl Publisher takes advantage of InDesign’s Alternate Layouts feature for creating dual-orientation apps, and the Book panel for organizing articles into issues.

The “Twixl Distribution Platform” for publishing issues into an app is very flexible. It can distribute Issue and Article content exported from InDesign with Twixl Publisher, as well as PDF and HPUB content, which provides some interesting publishing flexibility not available with any of the other products.

The chrome provided by the Twixl app builder is the most basic of any of the solutions. It is the only solution that doesn’t offer a thumbnail or scrubber view in the user interface.

Pricing

See bit.ly/1JXj5bo for complete pricing info.

Comparison of tablet publishing solutions

How to Choose the Right Solution

Which of these six choices is right for your needs? Here are my recommendations:

Familiarity  If you are looking for a solution that is the most like Adobe DPS 2014 (the “old” version of DPS) in terms of functionality and capability, Twixl Publisher is the clear winner.

Simplicity  Of all the solutions described, Twixl Publisher is also the easiest to learn and easiest to use, based on its single-panel interface and good support.

Interactivity  in5 is the solution that best translates all the native InDesign interactive features, such as the Animation and Timing panels, form fields, and DPS overlays into final app content. That said, Aquafadas offers the widest range of “canned” interactive experiences, such as puzzles, mazes, Sudoku, etc.

Text Capabilities  Aquafadas and App Studio offer the most robust text searches, not only bringing the user to the page containing the search word, but also highlighting the search word on the page. For comparison, Twixl Publisher only brings the user to the correct screen, and DPS and Mag+ have no search functionality at all.

Cost  If you just have a one-off app to create, such as an annual report or an interactive guide, look at in5, Aquafadas, or possibly App Studio, depending on your needs. These solutions have the best pricing for single-issue apps.

Sales Applications  If you need an app for distributing sales materials to a corporate sales force via enterprise (private) distribution on iPads, look at DPS 2014 and Twixl Publisher.

Periodicals  If you create periodicals, you should first look closely at DPS 2015 and decide if the radical new approach taken by this solution is right for you and your workflow. If not, look at any of the other solutions described here, as they all can be used for a periodical workflow.

I’m having an argument at the moment with the moderator of a closed InDesign group on Facebook who thinks that posting helpful links to other sites (such as InDesignSecrets or Lynda.com) is somehow spamming or trolling. In my opinion, posting links is one of the most important things we can do — because no one person or site can do it all. The internet has taught us that it’s the connections that are important. So, with that in mind, here are some connections that I think InDesign users will find interesting:

• Do you use Microsoft Office? If so, you should check out Anne-Marie’s newest Lynda.com title, “Managing Conversions  Between Adobe CC and Microsoft Office”
• RodsAndCones publishes a quarterly free tablet magazine about color management, and they did a fun interview with me! You can find links to download their magazine app (created with Twixl) here.
• The Pfeiffer Report did a terrific analysis of how using CC Libraries can improve your efficiency!
• Monica Murphy at Tech4Pub shares some insight into the brand new “Save As” behavior in CC 2015.3
• Curious about GREP in InDesign? Erica Gamet is doing a series of videos on the topic on her new YouTube channel!
• Woo hoo! All Lynda.com video courses are now available on Apple TV!
• Creating EPUB ebooks? Joshua Tallent has a nice write up about how to automate the inevitable cleanup
• Speaking of EPUBs, if you’re making them, you should check out these scripts from Rorohiko, written up by Laura Brady
• Learn more about Adobe’s Creativity in the Public Sector Survey in this article by Jerry Silverman
• Are you interested in creating plug-ins/add-ons for InDesign? Davide Barranca has a cool new book/course about building HTML panels. (While he’s focusing on Photoshop, it’s relevant for InDesign, too.)
• Markzware just released a freebie (Mac only, currently) app called ID Util which lets you preview InDesign documents even when you don’t have InDesign on your computer. (It even works with InCopy and IDML files!) My favorite part is that it enables Mac OS “Quick Look” on these files, too!
• For those of us interested in EPUB technology, it’s interesting that the IDPF and the W3C are considering merging
• If you haven’t heard of this documentary movie in development called Graphic Means, you should check it out! They’re largely funding it through pre-orders, so considering buying!
• This was a fascinating idea (nothing to do with InDesign): Facebook: The World’s Largest Bookstore?
• Do you script InDesign? If so, first of all you should come to the Creative Developers Summit at PePcon in June. Second, you need to see Keith’s post about how to make ExtendScript Toolkit (ESTK) fast again.
• Here’s a fun easy article about how to use Adobe Comp to make a flyer that you can finish up in InDesign
• Color Management for onscreen display (e.g. tablets) is tricky, but now that Apple is using both sRGB and DCI-P3, it may get even more confusing!
• Did you know Twixl Publisher 5 (for creating apps) is coming this summer? Check out what it will do!

Enjoy!

Adobe recently announced that Digital Publishing Solution (DPS) would become part of a new product called Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Mobile. Confused? You’re not alone. This is the second name change for DPS in less than a year. Why did Adobe do this, what’s changing, and what does this mean for DPS users?

You might have recently received this update notification and wondered what was going on!

A little background

Five years ago, when the iPad was unveiled, Adobe introduced Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) as a way for designers to produce digital, interactive magazines using InDesign. DPS provided a relatively simple tool for building a customized tablet app, an InDesign plug-in for creating app content, as well as a distribution platform for publishing this content into the custom app.

These were heady times. Adobe had great success selling the solution to most of the large magazine publishers. I traveled the country teaching people how to use DPS, and my PePcon workshops about DPS were full.

But a couple of years ago it became clear that people weren’t consuming digital magazines on tablets at the rate that many publishers had hoped. Users seemed to have a preference for a continuous feed of content delivered to their phone, instead of interactive, curated, magazine-style content delivered at infrequent intervals to their tablet.

So in 2015 Adobe announced a new product called Adobe Digital Publishing Solution (not Suite). This became known as DPS 2015, and the “old” DPS as DPS Classic. Existing DPS customers could choose to continue to publish using either DPS Classic or DPS 2015. But DPS 2015 made it possible to create a highly-custom, responsive app interface and navigation sytem, to publish a continuous feed of articles, and to include reflowable HTML content in an app.

Now, Adobe has decided to make DPS part of the Adobe Experience Manager product line.

Why the change?

1. Adobe sees a huge corporate market for AEM Mobile to create apps that distribute information to sales teams, provide training materials to employees, recruit new hires, show retailers how to display products, and many other uses. These are Adobe’s target customers for Adobe Marketing Cloud, of which AEM is a part.
   

   A screen shot from the AEM Mobile Web site. Umm…what about Publishing? That’s an industry, right?

2. These types of apps often need to contain content generated from a wide variety of sources. AEM Mobile apps can still include highly-designed content from InDesign, but also content exported from Powerpoint presentations and PDF files, as well as HTML content.
3. HTML content is the future, because such content can be auto-generated very efficiently from a Content Management System (CMS). And guess what? At its heart, AEM is a CMS. And, as a bonus, HTML content is responsive (able to reflow based on the screen size).
4. These corporate apps tend to be a mix of rich content mixed with app functionality. Creators of these apps want to include features such as payment calculators, location-aware features, data storage on the device, and connections to databases, email, and calendars. Adobe is promising that you will be able to include these types of widgets and device connections via future integration with Apache Cordova.

What does it cost?

Each iteration of DPS has become more expensive. There is no longer any kind of entry-level monthly “professional” subscription. Each contract is negotiated with Adobe based on the number of apps, size of company, size of audience, etc. Anecdotally, I’ve heard that pricing starts at around $50,000/year. Obviously, this price point is only attractive for customers with industrial-strength requirements.

What to do?

If you’re a DPS Classic user: You’ll be able to continue to use DPS Classic, unchanged, for now. You may need to renegotiate your contract with Adobe, but presumably you will be able to continue to use the DPS Classic platform until it is someday dismantled by Adobe. If you determine that you are no longer one of Adobe’s target customers, you should begin looking at some of the alternative solutions described below.

If you’re a DPS 2015 user: There is no immediate change to your workflow other than a new name and logo on the DPS (AEM) Web portal, the DPS (AEM) Preflight app, and the InDesign plug-in. In the months to come you will presumably see new features and capabilities available to you. Read this FAQ for more details for existing DPS customers.

If you’re looking for a digital publishing solution: Try a 30-day free trial of AEM Mobile and all of its promised capabilities, and determine if it is the right fit for you.

But what if you aren’t large enough to be an AEM Mobile customer?

Alternatives to AEM Mobile

The great news is that alternatives to Adobe DPS/AEM have matured a lot in the last couple of years.

• InDesign’s Publish Online feature makes Web-based digital publishing available to anyone, at no cost.
• An amazing InDesign plug-in called in5, particularly when paired with app-building solutions such as Phonegap, Baker Framework, or LiquidState, is very powerful and extremely economical.
• Twixl Publisher, Aquafadas, and MagPlus Designd are all systems that are quite similar to DPS classic in capabilities and operation, but much less expensive. In my opinion, Twixl Publisher is the strongest contender.

You can learn more about these solutions and more in my post-conference sessions Getting Started with Tablet Apps and Enhancing and Publishing your Tablet Apps at this year’s PePcon in San Diego.

 [Editor’s note: This article is in two parts. First, an article by Bob Levine; followed by additional notes by David Blatner.]

Adobe is announcing today that it will be “retiring” the Digital Publishing Suite Single Edition (DPS SE) from the Adobe Creative Cloud on May 1 (2015) and removing it as a purchasable product from Adobe.com even sooner, on December 4, 2014.

However, if you have SE projects already in the pipeline, or you’re a Creative Cloud subscriber (which includes an unlimited number of DPS SE applications), don’t panic yet — you have some breathing room.

Bob’s Commentary

Before I tell you what this means, let’s see what it doesn’t mean. Digital Publishing Suite will continue as a stand-alone publishing service for both Professional and Enterprise account holders. There are no changes right now to those plans that pertain to Single Edition apps. So, if you’re a Pro or Enterprise customer you can stop here.

If you’re a Creative Cloud subscriber, however, the value of your subscription just went down a bit. When May 1 rolls around, you will no longer be able to create or modify any Single Edition app. That said, 5 months should be plenty of time to wrap up any current projects so it’s not like Adobe is pulling the rug out from under your feet with no notice.

Why is this Happening?

While I don’t have any numbers, I don’t think it’s a secret that DPS SE never really caught on. It’s sort of an orphan product anyway. Not really an app, not really a book, not really anything. It’s caught between the worlds of a designer and a developer.  I would imagine the cost to maintain the platform for the very few using it, along with what is now an excellent, and in some ways a superior alternative, combined to make this move inevitable.

Fixed Layout EPUB

Adobe’s announcement points out that fixed-layout (FXL) EPUB has reached a point where it’s a better choice. Having investigated the features in it, I agree with them, especially for those that don’t understand the requirements that Apple has for Single Edition apps (mostly the fact that they need to be very interactive).

If Adobe had announced this earlier, I’d have been complaining about it quite loudly—because there was no alternative—but with the October release of InDesign CC2014, many of the interactive features available to DPS users are now a part of  FXL. Even native animations work! (I posted an article about this on my blog last week, before finding out about this announcement.)

The biggest drawback to the fixed-layout EPUB solution is the lack of compatible readers for these advanced EPUBs. Of course, the lack of readers is nothing compared to the limits of DPS SE, which is compatible with iPads only.

Still Want an App? There are Alternatives

The first, and easiest way around the loss of DPS SE is to find someone with a Pro or Enterprise account or to sign up for one yourself. Absent that, all is not totally lost here. While DPS Single Edition is great if you only want to publish on an iPad, it’s been evident from the start that Adobe was more concerned with multi-issue publishing. For anyone interested in Android, Amazon, or Windows market places, Single Edition was never a viable choice. Single Edition isn’t even compatible with iPhone!

Let’s take a look at the choices for other digital publishing services. The supported features and platforms they offer vary and in some cases (such as support for InDesign animations by some) are actually superior to DPS.

• Mag+
• Aquafadas
• Twixl
• AppStudio
• eDocker

All of the above vary in cost, features, and device support so I can’t really recommend one over the other. None are free, but they all offer InDesign plugins as free downloads and they have free readers, similar to Adobe Content Viewer available on the supported stores. If you feel strongly that apps are the way to go for your project, do your own homework and pick the service that’s right for you.

But… don’t dismiss FXL out of hand. As I already mentioned, it is good choice for many projects such as illustration heavy books, and it’s very simple to create as well as to view fixed layout EPUBs. In fact, as long as you have a compatible reader on your computer or mobile device, it’s just about as simple as creating a PDF. If you want to learn more about it, Anne-Marie has a wonderful course on lynda.com.

I think one of the things that doomed DPS SE was the requirements that you actually had to be a bit of a developer to publish the app. Many users never got past the point of the requirement of having a Mac to create certificates for the app as well submitting it to Apple. Even if you got past that point, you’re up against Apple’s very inconsistent review and approval/rejection process. This is something you will continue to run into even with other vendors.

While the value of Creative Cloud hasn’t diminished all that much—and to the vast majority of users the absence of DPS SE won’t even be noticed—I’m hoping that come May 1, Adobe will be a open to helping those have projects they haven’t quite finished or that need revisions. We’ll have to wait until then to find out.

David’s Commentary

It’s never good when a company cuts a product or service, and it’s always worse when it’s something that you use. When the bus company cuts the route you take to work, or the appliance company stops making the replacement items you need to keep your vacuum cleaner working, it’s annoying and an inconvenience. So Adobe’s announcement that they’re dropping support for DPS SE from Creative Cloud memberships is frustrating. But… a few things to remember:

First, not that many people used DPS SE. If you’re one of the few, then this is terrible, but the vast majority of CC members didn’t make SE apps and probably wouldn’t do so anytime soon. There are a number of DPS users, of course, but my sense is that the vast majority of people who get excited about DPS end up with the pro or enterprise accounts, not SE.

Second, compare DPS SE to Fixed Layout EPUB (FXL):

• DPS SE apps would only run on the iPad. FXL can be viewed on the iPad, iPhone, and any Mac running 10.9+. It can be viewed on Kobo devices, Readium-enabled Chrome browsers, and any Mac or Windows computer running Adobe’s free Digital Editions v4 software. That means your InDesign layouts could have a far wider reach than they could with DPS SE.
• While FXL from InDesign is not mature yet, it’s getting significantly better and the fact that Adobe appears to be getting behind this open industry standard is very exciting. There’s no doubt that FXL cannot currently replicate what DPS can, but I think over time it might even be able to do more.
• You can’t get analytics or multi-issue subscriptions with EPUB… but you can’t do that with DPS SE either (you need a higher level pro or enterprise DPS account to get that), so there’s no loss there.

For all these reasons, and more, I think that FXL is going to be a better publishing solution for many InDesign users… in fact, it may even replace PDF in a number of cases.

Listen in your browser: InDesignSecrets-166.mp3 (19.8 MB, 35:56 minutes)

• Upcoming InDesign Events and Deadlines
  • March 2: Early bird ends for Print + ePublishing Conference (May 14-16, San Francisco)
  • March 3: Creating Digital Publications with InDesign, UC Berkeley
  • June 13-14: InDesignSecretsLive! in NYC
• Recap of the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference (TOCCON)
• Interview with John McWade, founder of Before&After magazine
• Quizzler Update: Code Breaker! C’mon people! (see below)
• Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Sample Buttons

> Register for PePCon by March 2 for up to $200 off
> Diane Burns’ Creating Digital Publications with InDesign, UC Berkeley
> Info and registration for our 2-day, single track InDesignSecretsLive! in NYC
> O’Reilly eBooks optimized for Kindle Fire 8
> Anne-Marie’s Professional Web Site Design book
> Presentation Zen that very few presenters paid any attention to

> Mike’s and Anne-Marie’s PDF slides (include links to InDesign scripts) from TOCCON
> EPUB 3 Resources from TOCCON, collected by Matthew Diener from EPUBSecrets.com
> John McWade’s Before&After Magazine
> MOO.com Luxe Cards
> All about QR Codes and Teacup Software’s solution

> Our post about the Reappearing Sample Button Library

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Quizzler!

Listeners: The mystery image is below. CLUE: There are THREE E’s in this!

To enter this episode?s Quizzler: Send an email to info@indesignsecrets.com with the word QUIZZLER in the subject line and the correct answer to the puzzle (as described in the podcast).  You have until February 29 2012 at midnight CDT to send in your answer, one per user! We will randomly choose a winner from the correct answer(s). Winner will be announced in the first podcast in February, and receives the prize: a copy of every single one of our eBooks!

He’s hardly the stereotypical computer hacker — some hormone-addled, ultra-nerd 15-year-old who kills Saturday nights by breaking security codes. In fact, judging by the photos and bios posted on numerous Web sites, including www.freesklyarov.org, Dmitry Sklyarov is a gainfully employed Ph.D. student, a father of two, and an all-around good guy who’s being unfairly jailed and prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice.
And Adobe was apparently to blame — until last week, at least, when the company revoked its support for the prosecution of Sklyarov, the Russian cryptologist who developed a PDF password-pummeling application for the Russian company ElcomSoft. Though by now it’s jumped to the other side of the fence on this issue, Adobe originally called the FBI’s attention to Sklyarov’s software and to his presence in the U.S. Sklyarov was subsequently arrested, the fury of those who oppose the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was unleashed, and what will likely prove a pivotal test case for the law is now on the docket. Barring a miracle, we’re not going to hear the end of this for a long, long time.
Who, What, Where, and When
For those of you who have been in Bora Bora for the last few weeks (or just driving your U-Haul away from San Francisco, having sworn off technology when you left your Palm Pilot at your dot-gone desk), let me fill you in: On July 16 the FBI arrested 26-year-old Sklyarov in Las Vegas, where he was speaking at the Def Con 9 hackers conference. He found flaws in the security of PDF-based e-books, but instead of pointing them out to Adobe and helping them improve the security options in Acrobat, Sklyarov developed a product for ElcomSoft to exploit the weakness. The Advanced eBook Processor cracks passwords, thereby allowing licensed PDF-based e-books to be distributed for free, regardless of any protections that might have been encrypted in the file.
Adobe, as you might imagine, didn’t like the idea and eventually pressured ElcomSoft into taking the product off the market in the U.S. under threat of a lawsuit; its efforts were the basis of the Sklyarov’s arrest by the U.S. government. Sklyarov is being held without bail on charges of violating the DMCA by “trafficking in a product designed to circumvent copyright protection measures,” according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s office. He faces a potential $500,000 fine and up to 5 years in jail.
Why?
I’m not a big fan of Mr. Sklyarov. I don’t appreciate the software he developed, or the attitude by his supporters that Adobe is a brutish bully and he’s an innocent victim of corporate and governmental exploitation. (The Boycott Adobe site brandishes a clever but extreme twist on the Adobe corporate logo: a hammer and sickle in the middle of a red Adobe-like “A”.) I’m not saying the DMCA is perfect, but it’s the best protection we have at the moment against digital copyright violations. And it seems pretty clear to me that Sklyarov and ElcomSoft violated the DMCA, which states, “no person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, or otherwise traffic in any technology …[designed to circumvent] a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner.”
Moreover to my way of thinking, the product Mr. Sklyarov helped develop is just plain wrong. There’s an analogy being drawn that seems apt: Image that a locksmith discovers that the lock on your front door can easily be picked, using a paperclip bent in just such a way. Instead of notifying you that the lock should be changed, the locksmith begins selling paperclips pre-bent for the purpose, along with instructions for using it, thereby facilitating illegal entry and theft. The analogy is hardly perfect, but the comparison is valid: Sklyarov helped make a product that breaks e-book passwords, which facilitates copyright violation.
I know there is a contingent of people who believe that outlawing Mr. Sklyarov’s lock-picking kit is an assault on free speech, but that’s really a stretch in my mind. And many who are upset about Mr. Sklyarov’s arrest paint the scenario as that of a big, bad corporation — Adobe, of course — persecuting a high-minded individual who dared to stand his ground. Nothing personal, Mr. Sklyarov, but it just doesn’t wash: After all, Adobe is giving away the eBook Reader; ElcomSoft stood to profit from its Advanced eBook Processor software.
About Face
As far as I can see, wrongs on both sides have been righted, at least by the involved corporate entities: ElcomSoft took the product off the virtual shelves, and Adobe has backed down. First Adobe held that the software was a threat to copyright holders, but then it reversed itself: Adobe has by now gone so far as to say that ElcomSoft’s software could do good things, too, like allow e-books to become accessible to visually impaired readers. One has to wonder: If the software doesn’t really violate copyright law and can actually do good deeds, why make ElcomSoft pull it? The reversal was as blatant a PR move as could be on Adobe’s part, propelled by purely selfish business reasons (threat of a boycott in a weak economy). But who cares? Adobe has seen the light and has asked the government not to prosecute.
So why is Ashcroft’s office refusing to let it go? Probably because it wants to make an example of Mr. Sklyarov to all those so-called Liberals-with-a-capital-L who oppose the 1998 DMCA. But prosecuting Mr. Sklyarov is what we call “negative reinforcement” in parenting circles, and it’s a big no-no. The preferred method of discipline is to reward good behavior, and ElcomSoft ultimately did the right thing, by ceasing to sell the Advanced eBook Processor.
I bristle at hackers like Sklyarov, and at the whole argument that somehow because intellectual property is now available digitally — from MP3 music clips to DVDs to e-books — we should be allowed to share it freely. Frankly, I think Sklyarov is less a principled academic with high-minded convictions about intellectual property and more an opportunist who’s using our free-market economy and our tolerance of free speech for his own ends.
But the longer the government drags this out, the more it puts Sklyarov on a pedestal not just for the copyright counter-culture but also for the mainstream public. And making an example out of one individual — and not even the founder and president of the ElcomSoft, who was also at Def Con 9 — sends the wrong message: that those who would safeguard digital-media copyrights are as petty as the hackers are. I’m all for protecting copyrights, but let’s do it maturely, responsibly, and with a level head.
For more information and points of view on this topic, visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Association of American Publishers, Planet eBook, eBookWeb, and www.anti-dmca.org.