Adobe’s new digital magazine workflow is destined to change the way we design magazines forever. With rich multimedia, and pages based magazine interactivity, the new digital magazine design process will set the bar for all publishers that wish to cross the digital chasm and play in the new world of tablet magazine editions.

Magazine publishers will begin to see dozens and then hundreds of other iPad or tablet magazines and realize that they too must invest in the people, software, and workflows to grow their digital magazine brand. The growth will mimick the rise of digital magazine editions which is now a brand extension (perhaps on multiple platfoms) for most publishers. The rapid digital magazine growth accelerated just 3 years ago with publishers using one of a dozen core digital platform service providers and also a few in-house digital magazine builds.

These digital magazine providers might just rise again to provide better design widgets and cloud based tablet magazine edition production tools. If it’s just as easy to add multimedia and interactivity to an existing print layout magazine once produced for core digital edition (print clone) distribution, publishers might just skip the software based multimedia workflows.

Either way, the rise of the tablet magazine as a required element of any magazine brand is rapidly approaching. The advantage of being first is publicity. The advantage of waiting until your publication’s competitors have produced their tablet editions is cost and strategy. Think first of creating value for your niche and let that guide your move into the tablet edition magazine brand space.

Updated: How MSL Leverages their print magazine in the tablet magazine edition

Blog video: http://www.pagegangster.com/mobile-devices/

We are still in beta and version 1 territory, but it’s exciting to see what the innovative digital magazine vendors have created to leverage tablet technology.  This all within one month of the iPad release. Six months after the Kindle release we were still trying to get proper data formatting specifications for how to accommodate periodic data on the greyscale devices. A world of difference! I look forward to posting updates with more advances on the colorful and bright future of tablet magazines for publishers. I’m confident the pace will rapidly increase on new features and announcements from many vendors.

As digital media publishing industry leaders work in partnership with publishing tech vendors we begin to see the not so distant future of what we can provide both readers and advertisers.  One comment by ‘handrail’ on the Wired video reads, “I would buy an ipad just for e-wired!…”

We look forward to collaboration from Adode on how to create rich media presentations throughout the print magazine design process. And we thank the the publishing pros who are sharing their progress and ideas.