WoodWing decided to make its tablet publishing format publicly available free of charge, in an effort to work towards standardization for interactive publications.

Being the most-used tablet-publishing solution worldwide, WoodWing decided to make its publishing format publicly available free of charge, in an effort to work towards standardization for interactive publications. This applies to publications on tablets running for example iOS, Android, Blackberry Tablet OS and HP webOS, as well as in HTML5 browsers.

Zaandam, The Netherlands (April 7, 2011) – WoodWing Software (www.woodwing.com), a leading supplier of cross-media publishing solutions and an innovation leader in the tablet publishing market, announced today that the data format used in its Tablet Publishing Solution is now available as an open format, free of charge.

In a publication process, there are content creation tools at one hand, and output channels or devices on the other hand. Once markets are mature, standards will be established. For print, PDF eventually became the de-facto standard and the Web has been standardized from the beginning with the open HTML standard.

For tablets though, there is no standard format yet to describe the interactive tablet experiences. As a result, there is a direct dependency between the creation tools and the tablet apps. As a comparison, for print that would mean that one would need to use the creation tools of the manufacturer of the printing press. Or, for the Web, it would mean one had to use different creation tools for each of the Web browsers.

With the advent of tablets nowadays, more and more publishers are making their way onto this new publishing platform. As a leading supplier for this rapidly changing industry, WoodWing has already set the standard for close to 250 renowned publications.

“Our mission is to serve the publishing industry,” Erik Schut, President of WoodWing Software explained. “As a front-runner, we feel it’s our duty to catalyze standardization of a common format, which otherwise could easily take a few years. Publishers will seriously benefit from standardization, as it avoids vendor lock-in and will allow to pick and choose different suppliers and technologies for the various parts of the supply chain. Both the tools to create your publication, as well as the reader apps for the various platforms can be chosen freely. Before making this decision, we have carefully analyzed the existing and upcoming standards, as well as proprietary formats. As our tablet publishing solution is currently the most mature and has the most extensive feature set, we came to the conclusion that our format is a good starting point for an open industry standard. Being XML-based, it’s easy to transform from and to other formats to allow quick and easy interoperability.”

An important and pressing reason for standardization is the many upcoming multi-publisher digital kiosks. In such a kiosk, like PUBBLES from Bertelsmann in Germany, customers can shop for interactive magazines and newspapers from various publishing houses, just like in a physical kiosk, without distraction. With a standardized format in place, publishers can easily extend their audience via these kiosks.

WoodWing is already actively engaged with other leading technology suppliers to further evolve the format. Any player in the industry is invited to join this process.

More details on ofip (Open Format for Interactive Publications) can be found on www.ofip.info.