Meanwhile at the Adobe Blog

There’s some great reading over at the new Adobe Digital Editions blog. While much of the conversation is focused on the world of books (and not periodicals, as we tend to be at NXTbook), there are also some good philosophical questions re: the purpose, intent and future of digital editions. Adobe’s response (in part) focuses on the development of standards and the ability for books to be easily read on a myriad of devices.

Philosophically, we agree whole-heartedly, yet the future goes so much further than this. While cross-portability is how we can best replicate the features of print online that aren’t broken, the real future of digital publishing looks at the aspects of print which could be improved upon online.

Think about the things that print doesn’t do well:

* Enable collaboration both of readers (comments) and material (links)

* Enable archiving (beyond library cards)

* Enable various medias (audio, video and animation)

One commenter on the Adobe blog says that there is currently no e-book market and if he’s talking about selling replicated content to the same audience as he’s selling print, he’s right. That audience is already satisfied. But if a publisher tries to sell content that’s optimized for the web, or tries to sell it to markets where they can’t reach affordably quickly and affordably now (overseas or to a different audience), a value proposition is created. And where there is a value proposition, a product and an audience, there is a market.