You may want to hold off installing that new eReader app on your iPhone or iPad. You may not realize this, but Adobe will only let you play with so many eReading apps on your device before you run out of allotted authorizations. Or worse, if you’ve installed too many apps, you may be in trouble when you restore or replace your device.   I have been a longtime supporter of eBooks. Although I didn’t leap enthusiastically into them in my Palm Pilot days, I did have a few that I read. I especially loved to have the scriptures on my PDA. So convenient, and...

From IndesignSecrets.  For full details see the article: InDesign CS5.5 brings many improvements to the creation of EPUB files. A posting hererevealed some of the improvements. However, recently I ran into a bug which occurs when exporting EPUB out of InDesign CS5.5, which does not occur in InDesign CS5. It has been described as a WebKit encoding bug. I was working on creating two eBooks, and I had started them in InDesign CS5. When InDesign CS5.5 was completed, I happily opened them in the new version because using CS5.5 required a lot less postprocessing of the files. The chapters passed EPUB validation,...

How expensive should it be to publish an iPad magazine app? If you said it should cost at least £7003 ($11,537) per year, then you’ll like the deal Adobe is offering with the latest version of its Digital Publishing Suite, the iPad magazine InDesign plugin. Designer Elliot Jay Stocks blogs about Adobe’s pricing scheme, which involves a £3636 platform fee plus a minimum of £3367 set toward the .16 per issue Distribution Service Fee Adobe charges.This is in addition to the cost of the software itself, which doesn’t exactly come cheap, and the 30% fee Apple charges for...

From an article in the French publication Aldus. Here is a Google translation from the French: The consensus of the editors much less egregious than some are willing to say on those pesky DRM. Virginie Clayssen y revenait récemment lors de sa présentation à Bruxelles. Virginia Clayssen it returned recently when it was presented in Brussels. C'est près de 100 éditeurs français/francophones qui disent non à la solution d'Adobe pour une solution de marquage non intrusive ou pas de DRM du tout . Avec un total de 21478 titres, c'est près de la moitié de l'offre française actuelle. Almost 100...

eBookNewser reports that children’s author Mercer Mayer is going to be publishing books through e-publisher FastPencil in 2011. He will be publishing nine titles in 2011, and will be creating new character franchises exclusive to FastPencil in addition to the ones he already has. On ZDNet, James Kendrick has an interesting post in which he puts forward the theory that tablet computers are “impulse purchases”—things that people decide to buy because they look cool rather than out of any specific need for them. As such, he points out, they have to be priced low enough that the...

According to the ePub Books Blog, Highlander is offering two one day session in March and April in the UK, at 350Pounds. The course covers (among other things): * Overview o EPUB vs. PDF o Supported devices o What is kept and what is lost in EPUB? * Overview of InDesign long documents * Adobe Digital Editions reader ...

That's the title of an article in Intego's Mac Security Blog: In a recent presentation to the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, security researcher Julia Wolf highlighted a number of “features” of the PDF format that could lead to serious security issues. Wolf showed that a PDF could contain a database scanner that could “scan a network when the document is printed on a network printer,” and that PDFs could “blindly trigger the execution of arbitrary programs in Acrobat Reader.” PDFs also support “inherently insecure script languages such as JavaScript, formats such as XML, RFID tags and digital rights management (DRM)...

According to Martin Hoscik, in an article in eBook Magazine, he has had an awful time with tech support for Adobe Digital Editions. This is the DRM that most ebook publishers are using today. As part of the Adobe regime you have to register your ereader with them and you are allowed up to register up to 6 devices. Well, according to the Adobe FAQ if you already have 6 devices registered you can contact Adobe customer service and increase this amount. Except, of course, when you try to do so you are told, as Martin...

From the press release: Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that Google has licensed Adobe® Content Server 4 software as its ebook content protection solution for Google eBooks. With the addition of Google, more than 200 publishers and distributors worldwide have now deployed Adobe Content Server, making it the most pervasive Digital Rights Management (DRM) solution for ebooks and other digital publications. As a true cross-platform solution, Adobe Content Server enables consumers to purchase or lend ebooks through thousands of points-of-purchase without being tied to one store. With support of the Adobe® Reader® Mobile software development kit (SDK) on more than 85...

Khoi Vinh, formerly the design director for the New York Times’s website, has a post on his blog, Subtraction.com, looking at the problem with magazine apps for the iPad. (A couple of weeks ago, I covered another article on the same issue for which Vinh was interviewed.) The major problem, Vinh says, is that they are trying to be far too much like printed magazines, and failing to take advantage of advances the iPad makes possible. iPad magazine apps do attract strong advertiser interest, Vinh notes to his surprise. He suspects that it may be an indicator of a...

Here is an informative video podcast from the Adobe evangelist Terry White: "Adobe Digital Publishing to the iPad: A First Look" It is a 15 minute overview of the solution for building iPad apps that Adobe is building for magazine publishers. As you might expect there are some neat software solutions in the package, especially notable are tools for placing video in a document page, for interactive/panoramic 3D photos and model rotation, and for full integration of a web page in the document. Cool stuff. But the thing that really struck me with this overview is that Adobe is taking a big,...

From the press release: At MAX, Adobe’s annual worldwide conference, Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the Adobe® Digital Publishing Suite, providing publishers a set of turnkey hosted services and viewer technology to create, publish, optimize and sell digital content direct to consumers, through content retailers or leading mobile marketplaces. Built on the foundation of Adobe Creative Suite® and Adobe InDesign® CS5 software, the Digital Publishing Suite enables the design and delivery of innovative publisher-branded reading experiences, paired with flexible commerce models and support for deep analytics reporting. Using InDesign CS5, PDF, HTML5 and the Digital Publishing Suite, publishers will be...