THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING
Contrary to what Apple would have you think about their “magical” iPad: It’s not the hardware that’s “magical’ … it’s what the developers are going to DO with it.
Today e-readers, as cool as they are, still are nothing more that static digital copies of static printed documents. The future of digital publication is not in static digital media, but in fully interactive digital publications. Books that animate between pages, have images that when clicked become video, and pages that re-organize their layout based on the orientation of the device. This is the future.
This conceptual video is a corporate collaborative research project initiated by Bonnier R&D into the experience of reading magazines on handheld digital devices. It illustrates one possible vision for digital magazines in the near future, presented by the design partners at BERG.
The problem is waiting for the software to easily create these interactive documents. I’m a designer not a developer, so I need help to bring all this interactive potential to life. Adobe’s CreativeSuite5 is sure to include alot more tools for this sort of document, and InDesign CS4 can actually do quite alot of different things like “live” tables of contents, embedding media and creating buttons/hyperlinks. Until CS5, I’m leaning into ISSUU.com.
Issuu presents documents in a visual interface that looks and feels similarly to the way a magazine does in your hands. When you upload a pdf to their site, it automatically detects links and other hotspots linking them to outside pages. What I would really love to see is the ability to present video inside the document as a “lightbox” pop-up or an in-line photos that turn to video when clicked. Issu has been developing an app for the iPad since the end of ’09. It hasn’t been released yet, but I really I’m really excited to see what new feature’s they will include with it.
When you see this, what ideas does it give you? Do you have any tips or tools for creating digital media like this? Share.