Last week, in a sort of under-the-radar blog post, Adobe announced that it would begin offering the .folio file format under a free license. In case you don’t know what that file format is, it’s the format that Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) publications are saved in. I’ve been asked by a few people what it means and and my first response was “I don’t know, but it’s exciting.”
Why is it exciting? Because it opens up possibilities to outside developers to come up with additional solutions beyond what Adobe has. Just look at the PDF format. There are any number of applications that can read and create PDFs. Does this mean we’ll have scores of .folio readers? Maybe. Does it mean that some clever developer will come up with a way to create .folios from PowerPoint? Maybe. Could it open a new marketplace for digital publications? Maybe. Could .folio replace PDF for interactive documents? Maybe.
Right now it’s all conjecture but at the top of my wishlist is a way to create Single Edition apps for iPhone as well as Android, Kindle and Windows 8.1 devices.
If you’re working with DPS, what would you like to see happen once the file format is openly available?
This article was last modified on December 30, 2021
This article was first published on December 22, 2013
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