We’re extremely excited to be a part of the Society of Publication Designers’ “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” night tomorrow at the Helen Mills Theater in New York City.

Joe Zeff will moderate a discussion with two of the most intriguing characters in publication design: John Korpics of ESPN and Christopher Hercik of Sports Illustrated. Both are print designers who have evolved into multidisciplinary maestros, overseeing apps, television, websites, books and much more. And both are long-time clients (check out our logotype on the current ESPN The Magazine below) and long-time friends.

For tickets and more information, click here.

Apple announced iBooks 2 today, with features that may revolutionize textbook publishing — as well as other publishing markets. The toolset is Apple-intuitive, and the free iBooks Author application will empower armies of educators and designers to create their own interactive books. Adobe Digital Publishing Suite Single Edition previously lowered the cost of platform-based app development. Apple has now made it even less expensive — and less complicated — by offering templated layouts, easy-to-use widgets and tremendous functionality.

As much as we enjoyed Phil Schiller’s keynote today — particularly the part where he singled out “Solar System for iPad” as one of his favorites — we couldn’t help but cringe at his summary of iBooks 2:

“Anyone can create stunning, interactive books.”

Anyone, that is, with access to stunning photography, illustration, video, 3D models and HTML widgets they can drop into their templates. Production is not the obstacle to app development; it is creativity and content. Along with those stunning, interactive books one should expect to see a slew of mediocre ones, along with a lot of clones. As publishers rush to stock the App Store with interactive versions of their titles, one hopes they’ll do so with imagery, animation and programming that leverages iBooks Author as a starting point rather than an end game.

It will be interesting to see how Apple develops its burgeoning publishing platform, and what markets it will target next. There would be significant demand for turnkey catalogs with e-commerce tools; restaurant menus with point-of-sale capabilities; annual reports with widget-based charts and diagrams. Apple continues to change one industry after another. Hopefully the transformation of textbooks — and other industries — will be driven by visionaries who innovate beyond what Apple has provided.

iBooks 2 is free. Inspiration and imagination are priceless. Never confuse the two.

We had the good fortune to work with Melcher Media to produce best-selling author Timothy Ferriss’ new app for the Kindle Fire and Apple iPad: “The 4-Hour Chef Teaser,” a prelude to his hardcover book due next September. Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” and “The 4-Hour Body,” made news last fall by signing a deal with Amazon Publishing as its first marquee author.

Said Ferriss, “My decision to collaborate with Amazon Publishing wasn’t just a question of which publisher to work with … It was a question of what future of publishing I want to embrace. My readers are migrating irreversibly into digital, and it made perfect sense to work with Amazon to try and redefine what is possible. This is a chance to really show what the future of books looks like, and to deliver a beautiful experience to my readers, who always come first.”

The teaser app is available free here: Fire and iPad.

It contains recipes, videos and a diet plan for surviving the holidays. We’re especially proud of the interactive feature we created that allows you to drag a finger across the screen to make a bovine come apart Hannibal Lecter-style, revealing its cuts of meat! Delicious!

See for yourself: The Exploding Cow!

Some screenshots:

Crazy Mocha for iPad is a WoodWing app produced last week at Joe Zeff Design. We started Monday morning and submitted to Apple Friday night, just to see what we could pull off in a very short time. It has some fun things — a stylized Twitter feed, HTML-based coupons, location-aware mapping — that show the versatility of a platform-based solution.

The app demonstrates a few points we hold near and dear:

• Platforms like WoodWing and Adobe significantly accelerate production.
• HTML elements provide distinctive features to platform-based approaches.
• Publishing tools created for interactive books and magazines are ripe for deployment in business apps.

Be sure to download from the iTunes App Store. It’s free! (And be sure to poke the goat in the eye for a fun surprise!)

This just in from Adweek.com: Publishers are pulling back on enhanced apps, simplifying them in order to reach more people on more tablets! Time Inc. declares that interactive elements are “a secondary benefit!” And Hearst Magazines warns that enhancements are potentially distracting, confusing and irritating!

Bah humbug, we reply!

Tell that to the next generation of readers, accustomed to flinging Angry Birds across a screen with their thumbs, sharing information with friends through Facebook and text messages, and mashing together content from various sources to customize their experience. And tell that to the advertisers who want nothing more than to attract that generation.

The tablet is where tomorrow’s readers establish relationships with today’s magazine brands. A passive stack of PDFs won’t satisfy them, regardless of how many devices the publisher targets. Every major publisher already has access to creative tools in their platform-based workflows that deliver interactive panoramas, audio and video, social sharing, animated features, annotated graphics, and much more. The best solutions are those achieved through creativity, rather than expenditures. Advanced apps don’t require costly and time-consuming programmers; they can be achieved mostly through resources already in-house.

Steve Sachs at Time Inc. cites “a great reading experience” as the top priority. Consider that the tablet is inherently flawed as a reading device. It beeps and burps every time you receive an e-mail or appointment. The screen is too shiny to read outdoors, and the batteries will die in the middle of a paragraph.

The passive delivery of words on a screen is only part of the tablet experience. The opportunity to interact with content, and interact with its creators, makes that reading experience much more engaging. Magazines evolve from one-way monologues to two-way dialogues. And consumers of all ages develop deeper relationships with magazine brands, providing publishers with opportunities to extend those brands based on those relationships and subsidize the enhanced apps that make all of this possible.