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A possible replacement for PDFs or a new type of book?

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This one almost slipped past me. Bob Levine wrote about  it at InDesign secrets. Adobe’s now giving away licenses to the .folio format.

This could be huge! Magazines were dying because .folio was so expensive

Now maybe we’ll see some more folio readers. Maybe tablet reader apps will be able to handle folio also. Maybe PDF will finally go the way of the dodo. The ability to offer books with multiple columns and portrait/landscape versions gives technical and non-fiction books some real hope in the ereader world.

Keep an eye out for this…

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Comments

A possible replacement for PDFs or a new type of book? — 3 Comments

  2. My knowledge of .folio is limited to a couple of Adobe presentations I didn’t follow that well. Any further remarks you might make would be much appreciated.

    For instance, does this mean that authors/publishers can create ebooks with complex formatting that display well on a wide variety of devices from iPhones to iPads and even desktops? And does it mean they can create two versions, one landscape and the other portrait? Is it basically a supercharged version of ePub’s fixed layout?

    In short, does this signal a return to what print has always offered, the ability of those doing layout to drive out a book actually looks rather than have it driven by the whims of ereader apps?

    I also wonder if .folio is flexible enough, generated by apps such as InDesign, to be easy to create. I’m not the niggling type. I don’t want to spend hours tweaking something to get it just right. I want a template in which I can drop text and pictures and have it just work. I also don’t want steep learning curves. I’ve found ways to make it easy to create print and ePub books from the same InDesign document. I wonder if having ID generate a .folio version will be similarly easy.

    –Michael W. Perry, Inkling Books, Auburn, AL

  3. So far, there’s more hope than reality. It’s not simple, but the capability comes with InDesign CC [and started with CS5.5, as I recall]. I’ve done nothing with it so far because it cost several hundred dollars a book. Those costs are gradually going away. Then this ability will be really useful, I hope.

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