Adobe announced at Mobile World Congress that its digital publishing suite, which allows content publishers to craft magazine-like content for tablet computers, is now going to be available for Android in addition to iOS.
Adobe software is currently used to create over 100 publications that run on iOS devices, including Wired, The New Yorker and our own Portland Guide. The growth of Android tablets is seen as key to enabling maximum reach. With the introduction of the Content Viewer for Android, the resulting publications will run as Adobe AIR applications on Android-based tablets.
Adobe’s software will support Android 3.0, Honeycomb, and higher. It will offer the same options as found in the iOS suite, including the analytics feature which tracks the app’s usage and how end users move through the magazine’s pages. Support for HTML5, navigational elements, visualizations, and overlays, will be included, just like the iOS version.
Digital Publishing Suite supports direct entitlement (where publishers can fulfill digital content by integrating with a print subscriber database) as well as in-app purchase (currently through Apple App store, with planned support for Android Market).
The new Google eBooks service uses Adobe eBook DRM, called Adobe Content Server. Using InDesign CS5, publishers can leverage the skills of their design staff to produce eBooks without resorting to costly third-party conversion houses.
Google will pay the publisher 52 percent of the list price if a title is sold through Google’s store, or 45 percent if it is sold through the company’s retail partners, which include Powell’s and Alibris.
With Adobe Digital Editions content protection, said to be the most pervasive Digital Rights Management (DRM) solution, Google eBooks can be read on tablets like Apple’s iPad and dozens of other tablet-size devices.
The way books are created, distributed and read is changing. Amazon, Borders, Barnes and Noble and independent booksellers like Powell’s Books in Portland are heading into unknown territory.
According to Forrester’s five-year forecast for eBooks in the U.S., 2010 will end with a total of $966 million in eBook sales. It’s expected to triple, with $3 billion in sales by 2015. At that point the industry will be forever altered, says the study’s author. Penguin Books sees ebooks hitting 10 percent of book sales next year (it’s currently four percent in the U.S.).
Forester says 14% of Americans — 27 million people – plan on purchasing a tablet device next year.
A similar study by the Magazine Publishers of America found that nearly 60 percent of U.S. consumers expect to purchase an e-reader or tablet within the next three years.
Today, just 7% of online adults who read books read e-books.
Publishers need to make ebooks the new default for publishing, says McQuivey of Forrester Research.
The e-book market is the fastest-growing segment of the bookselling industry. Goldman Sachs forecast in April that sales of e-books in the U.S. would rise by 47 percent each year sequentially until 2015. They forecast $3.2 billion in e-Book sales by 2015.
- Goldman forecasts Apple’s e-book market share to explode to a third of all e-books sold in 2015. Currently they have 10 percent of the market.
- Amazon’s has half the market share presently. Goldman expects Amazon sales to fall to 28 percent by 2015.
- Currently Barnes & Noble has just 5 percent market share. Goldman expects this to grow to 15 percent of e-book sales by 2010.
Amazon says magazine and newspaper publishers can earn 70-percent royalty on each title they sell in the Kindle Store. Amazon also introduced a self-service publishing tool for magazines and newspapers, similar to its Digital Text tool for books.
Related e-book articles on Dailywireless include; Google Editions: Web eBooks Readied , Bookstores: Preparing for E-Books?, e-Publishing: The New Normal, iPad Publishing Model: It’s People!,
