Keynote speakers:

• Joe Zeff, President of Joe Zeff Design, an influential design and strategy firm outside of New York City that advises publishers and corporations on app development. His company has designed three apps that have been chosen App of the Week by Apple, and one that resides in the Apple iTunes Hall of Fame. Formerly the Graphics Director of Time magazine, Joe and his team have created hundreds of magazine covers and illustrations, and they have leveraged their expertise in traditional publishing to become a leader in the digital space, working closely with large publishers to advise on content development and produce monthly issues for the iPad and other platforms. Joe is a board member of the Society of Publication Designers in New York City and WoodWing’s first Creative and Design Partner.

• Mitch Klaif, Senior Vice President of Information Technology at Time Inc. Mitch has worked at Time Inc. since 1997, beginning his career there as director of customer service and operations for information technology. He then served as deputy chief information officer, assisting in the overall management of the company’s information technologists and its hundreds of mission-critical systems. Before moving to his current position, Mitch served as Time Inc.’s CIO and vice president of global magazine and digital technology, where he led the division that managed the company’s around-the-clock magazine, production and digital technology operations. Mitch began his career in information services at Dow Jones in 1976, where he worked for 20 years.

• Zeke Koch, Senior Director of Product Management, Design at Adobe Systems. In this role, Koch oversees the strategy, planning and design for Adobe’s Digital Publishing products. Previously, Koch was principal product manager for Adobe’s Platform Strategy where he was responsible for defining strategy and direction for Adobe’s “Vectors of Innovation” including Multi-screen, Cloud and Social Computing. Earlier, Koch was the director of product management for Adobe’s Mobile and Desktop Platform Product Management teams (including the Flash Player and AIR). Koch joined Adobe from the acquisition of Macromedia where he was group product manager for Mobile Clients. Prior to Adobe, Koch spent a decade at Microsoft, first as a program manager on the Word 97 team and ultimately as the group program manager for the Windows Mobile Shell team.

• Ravi Gopalakrishan, CTO of Barnes and Noble’s Nook product business. Ravi established the Nook development team in Palo Alto, CA in April 2009 and has since led the development of four successful Nook products: Nook, Nook Color, Nook Simple Touch and most recently Nook Tablet. All four products have been highly successful and have helped Barnes and Noble grow its e-book market share from zero to over 25 percent in less than two years.

• Hans Janssen, CEO of WoodWing Software. Hans is one of the founders of WoodWing Software and has stepped into the role of CEO since August 1st, 2007. He has more than 20 years of experience in the publishing industry, both on the technical side and on the business end. Janssen previously worked as the technical director for Mediasystemen, after which he became the Director of IT for the Telegraaf Media Groep.

• Erik Schut, President of WoodWing Software. With 15 years of experience in developing state-of-the-art solutions for the publishing industry, his thorough understanding of this industry combined with the latest technology and creativity, result in best-of-class solutions.

Joe Zeff Design works closely with WoodWing and Adobe to help publishing companies develop strategies for digital publishing. We’re currently working with two large publishers to produce innovative iPad editions of their print magazines. We provide these publishers with end-to-end support, from design to production to advertising to subscription integration to workflow, assisted by WoodWing and Adobe.

For more information on the WoodWing Xperience, visit their website here. See you in Amsterdam!

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.

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.

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:

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!)

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.

Some of the takeaways:

• The WoodWing-Adobe partnership creates a single standard for publishing magazines on the tablet. Adobe DIgital Publishing System (DPS) enables content creators large and small to produce dynamic apps with minimal programming. WoodWing enhances that system by adding a way to manage content, distribute work among multiple users and enhance creativity through InDesign plug-ins that simplify complicated programming.

• Adobe announced that all three versions of its DPS are now available for sale:

Single Edition enables anyone with InDesign to buy a $395 encryption key from Adobe’s website that enables them to publish a single iPad app to the iTunes Store. At this point it is iPad-only, non-updatable and analytics-free, but nonetheless a breakthrough product that makes tablet publishing accessible to the masses.

Professional Edition is available for a $495 monthly subscription or a $5,940 annual fee. It allows publishers to create an unlimited number of updatable apps for the iPad, Android, PlayBook and — drumroll please — the Amazon Kindle Fire. These apps consist of standalone apps in which content is bundled and sold through app stores, and shell apps published to stores and individual issues that are downloaded from Adobe’s servers for an additional fee. Both types include access to analytics that track user flow, providing valuable information for designers, publishers and advertisers alike.

Enterprise Edition is the Swiss Army knife of DPS systems, with enhanced subscription options and pricing based on the publisher’s specific requirements.

• The audience was just as interesting as the panelists, and their questions were enlightening. There seems to be growing interest in publishing apps outside of the app stores — primarily for businesses looking to promote themselves, companies that seek more effective ways to disseminate information to a targeted audience, and enterprises that need to ensure that their content is secure. Hart suggested that Adobe will address this need in upcoming releases of DPS.

• A show of hands indicated that most of the audience came from large publishing companies that already had platforms in place — roughly 35 percent were WoodWing and 65 percent were Adobe. When asked how many in the crowd would be interested in training resources, the response was nearly unanimous. Joe Zeff Design will be working with the companies and SPD to identify ways to deliver that training — not just how to build apps but why to build apps and how to build better apps — in the near term. Stay tuned!

• There is considerable anticipation for the Amazon Kindle Fire, shipping next week, and expectations that its underpinnings in e-commerce will spawn a second revolution in tablet publishing with enhanced monetization opportunities.

• Once again, thanks to Tekserve for donating an iPad 2 that was won by Amy Jaffe, an art director. Many thanks to our partners at Tekserve, as well as the Indefatigable Emily Smith at SPD for organizing yet another amazing event!

The event is part of the Society of Publication Designers’ speaker series, titled “Tablet Town Hall: Questions and Answers About the Next Generation of Tablet (and Kindle) Publishing.” It is scheduled for Nov. 10 at the Helen Mills Theater in Manhattan. Tickets are limited, and available here.

Adobe and WoodWing are the leading platforms for publication apps. The two companies recently announced a partnership that integrates Adobe’s Digital Publishing System into the WoodWing Enterprise system. As a result, WoodWing users will be able to use Adobe and WoodWing creation tools interchangeably within InDesign and output content using Adobe’s Digital Publishing System (DPS). Meanwhile, Adobe announced plans for a Single Edition version of DPS that brings down the price for developing a standalone app to $399.

All of this is great news for designers. WoodWing will continue to develop its Digital Publishing Tools, including its innovative HTML5 widgets that allow non-programmers to configure code through InDesign menus. Adobe’s content viewer is much more user-friendly than Apple’s Xcode environment, making it easier to preview and distribute apps in development.

Steve Hart from Adobe and Shawn Duffy from WoodWing will deliver presentations, followed by a question-and-answer session moderated by Joe Zeff of Joe Zeff Design. For more information, visit the SPD site here.