Scribd hopes that magazines will let it create an HTML5 app for them in a matter of minutes, rather than creating expensive, stand-alone apps, reports Paid Content. The only price: Scribd wants a share of the ad revenues.
Forbes is the first major magazine publisher to use the Scribd platform to create a digital magazine replica.
In a conversation with Jared Friedman, CTO and co-founder of Scribd, told paidContent that since the free, online-only Forbes “special issue” on Warren Buffett was released on May 25th, it’s been read on Scribd’s site over 25,000 times.
Scribd is currently setting up trials with several other magazine and book publishers, but the company wouldn’t identify who they are.
Friedman said, if you bought that Wired iPad app, you’d better have a lot of free space on your device because it takes up 500MB. HTML5, by contrast, shrinks everything down and takes us a matter of minutes to convert.
WIRED used Adobe authoring and design tools like Adobe InDesign CS5 and additional Adobe publishing technologies for creating their iPad version.
Wired sold close to 73,000 downloads — almost as many copies as the magazine sells on the newsstand – just nine days after launching its $4.99 iPad application. July’s ad pages will be up 28% and August’s more than 50%, according to the magazine.
Adobe Systems on Thursday released AIR 2, upgrading features and making it mobile. AIR lets a Net application run on a variety of computing platforms–Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Google Android.
AIR applications run on their own, not within a browser. The software can run standalone programs written either with Adobe’s Flash technology or, courtesy of a built-in WebKit browser engine, with HTML and JavaScript. It’s used for applications like Tweetdeck, and a New York Times reader with a built-in crossword puzzle. AIR 2 also benefits from the improvements in Flash Player 10.1, also released Thursday.
