Much is being made of the iPad from all manner of pundits and commentators. I added my own rather contrary perspective concerned as I am that the iPad is little more than a glorified credit-card conduit directly to the Apple store.
Whilst it will be magazine and newspapers publishers primarily keen at the idea of electronic versions of their publications – not to mention countless advertising brochures – the bigger picture that I do find appealing in the iPad (as the first of soon to be many full-colour, tablet-style, portable e-media viewers) is the potential for this kind of mobile delivery as a hybrid, rich-media narrative platform.
For some time Adobe InDesign has been able to incorporate video, audio and Flash elements into what is ostensibly a desktop publishing layout tool. Exported then as PDF with the media embedded around design, text and graphics, an interactive, multi-media, hybrid form of video, audio book can be produced. However the idea of such a creation has flaws. The first is that it really doesn’t do anything a website doesn’t or cant do. So its a partially obsolete medium. The second missing piece that hobbled such Transmedia creations and experiences was a lack of viable mainstream popular way to view outside of the web. Such PDF’s were really only viable on a laptop. But tablet devices change the playing field a little.
Publishers (and potentially Artists/Writers/Directors) may desire the ability to deliver their creation not as a variable website that is difficult to monetize short of subscriptions and logins, but rather as a single self-contained ‘product’ that can be sold and transferred as a commodity from an electronic store. This is where a PDF-based, InDesign generated rich-media video-book contraption may see a viable ascendancy.
And it seems that Adobe see the same vision with a test case of an iPad edition of Wired magazine. Coinciding they have announced a roadmap to bring add-on functionality and a new compiler to InDesign CS5 to enable export to a iPad as a digital publishing platform. Adobe cite of course their targeted market constituents of Book, Newspaper and Retail publishers but what excites me more is the idea of Filmmakers and Writers seeing InDesign as a primary creative tool for cinematic storytelling in a Transmedia eco-system.
With a few iPads floating around my place of work right now and the Adobe CS5 installed on my laptop and home studio I intend to do a little testing to see what might come of such explorations…
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