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Adobe today announced the launch of its new Digital Publishing Platform, integrating the company's InDesign CS5 with other publishing tools to assist print publishers with converting their content for digital consumption on devices such as the iPad.

But the more book publishers, more magazine publishers, more newspapers, the more video game creators, and textbook companies Apple can pull on board, the more attractive the iPad will become as a one-stop shop for media.

The Digital Publishing Platform being developed by Adobe allows publishers and advertisers to create immersive onscreen experiences that combine the visual impact of print design, the immediacy of touch interaction, and the engagement of interactive elements such as video, audio, animated infographics, 360° views, and more. Because this platform builds on the foundation of Creative Suite 5, it lets magazine design, editorial, and production teams use familiar tools and skills to efficiently create versions for print and a wide range of screens. Integrated analytics will enable publishers to plan editorial content and provide advertisers with accurate, detailed insight into how readers are interacting with stories and ads.

The iPad could give rise to a new creative self-publishing crowd that could, in turn, become competition for the established publishing industry.

A funny thing happened once the actual SDK was released to the broader development community: small houses and individual programmers delivered the first round of best selling games before the big companies got their products to market.

I suspect the first group to really embrace this will be educators who have created course material that includes audio and video, along with standard text. Authors of how-to books may also embrace video to enhance the learning process. Better yet, authors can take advantage of Apple's distribution power by making each book an app that can be sold through the iBookstore. By doing this, authors bypass publishers altogether.

Some publishers have touted digital readership as a way forward for the magazine industry as advertisers warm up to iPad editions. The 58 magazine iPad editions tracked by the Publishers Information Bureau posted a 24.5% gain in ad units through June. Still, tablet circulation has not increased as rapidly as publishers had hoped.

Magazines apps are still too big for iPads because of all the images. Each iPad magazine takes up way too much storage, and people get turned off by the iPad magazines because of that. This is a problem specific to magazines because of all the imagery, especially for ads. Books don't have this problem, since they don't need ads. The situation reminds me of early tiny MP3 players before the iPod came out with its hard drive that could store your whole MP3 collection. Magazines on iPads will start to happen once you can store a hundred or thousand issues on them at once.

With the release of the iPad, companies with dedicate Apps Powered by PixelMags will be able to offer full-sized, digital versions of their publications, complete with interactive components like video and streaming media, at a fraction of the cost of the hard copy paper versions of their magazines and newspapers. The Apps will be compatible with the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

Too few emerging online journalists understand that the function of news publishing has changed in the Internet era. Simply reporting the news, however you might define that, is no longer enough, not when you are publishing in such a competitive environment. The journalists who succeed online are the ones who understand that they are no longer simply reporters... they've become community organizers.

you have to have a community that supports you, if you want to make a living online.

your past earns you nothing online. Whatever audience you will have there, you must build yourself

With the advent of digital devices and rich new ways of shaping content, the pressure is on to rethink how we produce and present our stories. Looking into why the broken-narrative experience happens may help us figure out how to prevent it in digital publishing.

Lonny looks and acts like a print magazine, not a Web site or a blog. It has pages to turn, a table of contents and full-page ads. But it offers Web-only benefits like zoomable, clickable images, so readers can inspect a lamp displayed in a photograph of someone’s living room and then click to buy it.

Lonny is published every other month using Issuu, a Web platform where, for $19 a month, anyone can upload a PDF and instantly create an online magazine that looks like a print one.

“you’ll know a new narrative form has emerged when you have to consume a particular story on an iPad to truly understand its content, and reading it on any other platform simply wouldn’t work.”

Issuu is the leading digital publishing platform delivering exceptional reading experiences of magazines, books, catalogs, reports, and more. In just a few seconds users can create beautiful digital editions simply by uploading their publications.

"Apple is expected to announce soon a new subscription plan for newspapers, which hope tablets like the iPad will eventually provide a new source of profits as media companies struggle with declining print circulation and advertising revenue."

"Publishers wanted to pay Apple a fee rather than a cut of subscription and advertising revenue, and are not happy with Apple's terms, he said. They had hoped to offer app editions as part of subscription bundles that include print versions of the paper. Instead, they must use Apple as an intermediary with subscribers,"

Zinepal turns existing web content into printable PDFs and eBooks in the ePub, Amazon Kindle and Mobipocket formats. It is the easiest way to repurpose your existing web content and reach additional audiences using eBooks and printable PDFs.

Different genres of magazines are having decidedly different starts.

science and tech titles, for example, would probably have more fans among the first iPad owners than, say, a home decor magazine.

"The majority of advertisers who jumped on board in the beginning recognized this wasn't about scale," said Robin Steinberg, senior VP-director of publisher investment and activation at MediaVest USA. "2010 and possibly 2011 are mostly viewed as exploratory years. We are in a laboratory learning as we go. Short term, we are entering these types of initiatives to gain understanding and get exposed on a test-and-learn basis. The question is: Was it at the right price? And moving forward, should it be the same price? Doubtful."