Digital publishing is getting better… and better…

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple of years talking to people about the benefits of Adobe’s DPS. It’s a great system. Full of rich features. And the results are excellent. But the biggest barrier to getting them widely used is cost. That barrier got bigger last year when Adobe announced it was winding up its ‘single edition’ offering.

For those of you who don’t know, “single edition” referred to the ability to publish a “single edition” app (a digital magazine, catalogue etc) on the App Store, as part of your creative cloud membership. Along with other agencies we offered this to clients for an inclusive production fee. There were no download charges and in many ways it was a great deal. But it worked for iPad only.

This was a problem for many. But rather than widen its scope Adobe have effectively killed it off. Now you need an enterprise or pro license to publish single editions. Which cost… a… lot…

At  we’ve been open minded on where to go from here. When we started experimenting with Twixl at the end of last year I refrained from jumping around with excitement. Twixl is an InDesign plug-in and it lets you do what DPS lets you do. But there were differences and… well… could it be as good?

A few months on, I increasingly think it beats DPS at its own game. Why? Partly because it is straightforward. And our concerns that it might be too limited have proven unfounded. We’ve been working on a project that includes video, animation, pop ups a plenty… the effects are first class… and we are getting far fewer problems executing this in Twixl than we had with similar features on DPS and on Mag+ (another, similarly set up InDesign plug in.)

Now, I know that Adobe are preparing to launch their updated version of DPS – Adobe Publish. Their Fast Company app – which I’ve written about previously – is excellent. But there’s no word on pricing yet and little on how the system works. It’s Adobe, so don’t expect it to be cheap.

And this is where I believe Twixl really wins out: the cost. If you are looking to create a content led app, I honestly think Twixl offers the best option right now. It’s a fraction of the cost of Adobe’s packages. We can include all the rich content you want – video, audio, live pages, html games. And it even includes the option to create a ‘web reader’: so your free content can be viewed on desktop as well as on mobile devices.

Get in touch if you want to know more and how Start Digital can help you get your publications into the App Stores.

Thomas Quinn is founder of Start Digital, a Glasgow based digital publishing company. [email protected]