Adobe’s Bizarre Digital Publishing Approach

Adobe Systems is clearly the leader in print publishing with InDesign and all of the supporting tools it ships. But their digital publishing approach is like saying to you, “Oh…if you want to send your print job to a printing company that uses a digital press than you have to spend A LOT more money.” 

One of our businesses publishes a six-times-per-year print newsletter and multiple ebooks (i.e., PDF-based) as trend publications for the home furnishings industry. After weeks of research I’ve determined that the best solution is Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite and it’s what drives many major publications who have made the switch to digital tablet publishing.

The good news? Adobe’s Digital Publishing “Single Edition” is $395 (or you can join the “Creative Cloud” and get ALL of Adobe’s apps as well) and you can create and ship “unlimited iPad apps” publications.

The really bizarre bad news? To publish multiple issues within one of those iPad publications — or to publish to Android or Kindle — one needs to step up to the “Professional Edition” which costs $495 per month!

While I appreciate that Adobe thinks that their position in publishing will enable them to escape disruption from others who will deliver tools to cross-platform publish, this is ridiculous. If I was going to just publish to the iPad I wouldn’t pay Adobe a nickel. I’d much rather use the far more robust and easier to use iBooks Author from Apple.

I suspect Adobe’s strategy is to to make the on-ramp to digital publishing simpler for their print publishing designer base. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Adobe, but most of them have gone on to other gigs like house painting or selling insurance. It’s a stupid strategy to make the Single Edition affordable and the price delta to go “Pro” like moving up from a Honda Civic to a Ferrari.

Posted in ,  

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Is the Honda Clarity a Lemon?

Mine is a lemon.

Read all of my Honda Clarity posts

About Steve Borsch

Strategist. Learner. Idea Guy. Salesman. Connector of Dots. Friend. Husband & Dad. CEO. Janitor. More here.

Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn

Posts Menu

Posts by Category

Archives (2004 – Present)

SiteGround is ‘The One’

READ THIS PAGE to learn how and why I finally found “the one” web hosting company I heartily endorse and use, SiteGround, and why it is highly likely to be the perfect web hosting company for you.

Connecting the Dots Podcast

Podcasting hit the mainstream in July of 2005 when Apple added podcast show support within iTunes. I’d seen this coming so started podcasting in May of 2005 and kept going until August of 2007. Unfortunately was never ‘discovered’ by national broadcasters, but made a delightfully large number of connections with people all over the world because of these shows. Click here to view the archive of my podcast posts.
https://iconnectdots.com/2012/11/adobes-bizarre-digital-publishing-approach.html
iconnectdots.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-29
82964
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:R2Q4JSEXWUC54H7ANPXAM6BKUJQVQSLF
<urn:uuid:84d910e0-0139-456b-84e3-94faf862ec14>
2020-07-07T08:43:24Z
35.209.20.181
text/html
sha1:JZQYS4I7O3FF3JXB4NCUZ6JZNSSHUUJW
<urn:uuid:da0aef13-bc47-4643-bb4c-3e159c848eae>
https://iconnectdots.com/2012/11/adobes-bizarre-digital-publishing-approach.html
response
<urn:uuid:de225e6d-9423-42dd-8f17-61f24c745ad1>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-29
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for July 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-140.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/