woodwing

A lot has been written about the iPad since (and before) it made its debut in April in the United States. Sales have been a tremendous success and there is a constant push in areas where Apple has not launched it to start selling it as soon as possible. The iPad has been hailed by many in the publishing industry (most notably Rupert Murdoch) as the saviour of the industry. And I think they are right. Even though I must admit I was a sceptic at first, once I held one in my hands and really started using it I felt its potential impact. Not only to the publishing industry but to the way people use and interact with a computer. Because that is what it is, and a quite powerful one at that.

Apple’s iPad has also has transformed our own business as an editorial workflow vendor. All of a sudden a completely new publishing channel was added to the mix of print, web, mobile, and social media. And fortunately for us we acted quickly; together with Time Inc and the Wonder Factory in New York WoodWing developed the iPad Tools and Digital Magazine solution. Time’s first iPad issue went live together with the product launch of the iPad in the United States. Since then we have signed up many customers, also in the Asia Pacific region, which I manage for WoodWing: ACP Magazines have launched APC Magazine and were the first publisher in Australia to be ready for the iPad; in Japan the Mainichi Shimbun launched the PhotoJ app which became an instant success.

In my region many magazine publishers have not yet adapted to editorial workflow solutions. Instead they have opted and gotten by with manual file and folder based workflows. PDF files are created manually for every single page of the magazine and used for archiving; a lot of production work has been outsourced to pre-press companies. Approval processes still go through offline job bags, flat plans are hand drawn and articles have to be edited inside the design software after they have been placed on the page. Images that are used often reside in image libraries but there is no proper structure in place to organize them if they need to be used elsewhere. A lot of magazines do not have any of the core content published on the web. If they do it is either copy pasted manually or converted into a page flipping experience (using print PDF files) like for example Zinio and Realview.

Many of the above magazine publishers realized quickly how successful the iPad platform was going to be. But when they started to think how to put their content on this new platform, the reality of the restrictions of the manual workflow sunk in. Designers pointed out that they did not have the time and framework (see above manual situation) to create the iPad experiences the management required. In many cased IT and/or digital departments started planning big R&D projects, either outsourcing a lot of development work to expensive third party developers or doing this in-house. What became apparent very quickly that there was limited know how available to create compelling iPad publications and that doing it this way was going to be a very difficult and costly affair in order to sustain publishing editions every single week or month.

Enter the WoodWing Digital Magazine solution: by implementing a simple editorial workflow to hold all the design elements together, combined with special tools within Adobe InDesign, a publisher can let the existing designers also do the digital design with the print design as a base. The existing manual workflow does not have to be touched at all, or only peripherally; all of a sudden a manageable, scalable, and cost-effective solution is presented. And on top of that, if needed, a lot of the manual processes described above can be improved as well, creating efficiencies that can be put to good use for the new iPad project. Designers are happy that they are in charge of the design of the iPad magazine and all of the interesting design options the device offers. Management is happy that not too many additional resources are needed (both human and financial) and that they can focus on selling advertising on this great new platform.

Implementation of the tools is not as difficult as one might imagine. We have done many iPad workshops for publishers all over the region here in our regional office in Malaysia (following our HQ example). During these two-day workshops a designer and and editor build a complete prototype design together and leave the workshop with an iPad in hand with their own working application on it. Astonishing results were accomplished in very little time, proving that our concept works in these publishers’ environments. Real-life implementations can be done in a matter of weeks, not months. Beautiful and functional applications can be submitted in a matter of weeks as well.

In my opinion the iPad has been a great educational tool for magazine publishers as to why they need an editorial workflow solution. Managing the creative process and its design components efficiently in one place is vital to having the ability to publish easily to multiple channels, which in term is vital to the long-term survival of their business. The iPad is only one of those channels with HTML5 and Flash output being just as important later down the line. It has also been a great showcase for WoodWing to show that our solutions can be implemented in a time and cost efficient way compared to many expectations of it costing a fortune with very long implementation times.

The iPad has proven that the future for magazine publishing is bright with devices like the iPad leading the way. Let our solutions be the tools to make this future happen successfully!