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E-Reader, Other Conversions from soliDAM
By
Jim Rosenberg
Published: October 21, 2009 10:58 AM ET
NEW YORK Among exhibitors at last week's IFRA Expo in Vienna, where mobile solutions were widely offered, and e-readers in particular having been the subject of an IFRA conference only days earlier, Dutch company soliDAM b.v. positioned itself as the go-to guys for e-reader solutions.
The company has a broader business, however, providing and maintaining its own and partners' software for managing digital assets, platemaking, distributed printing, and publishing workflow, including electronic editions.
In Vienna it promoted its technical and outsourcing capabilities for electronic publishing, offloading responsibility from publishers for conversion of content into formats suitable for various channels or destinations.
The company, headquartered in Vianen, south of Utrecht, has no business to date in North America. Its Miami office serves Latin America. Other locations are in the United Kingdom, Germany, South Africa and India.
The company will accept PDF files or "whatever your system can give us," says CEO Arjen van Aalderen. Supplied with sufficient information, soliDAM can process content automatically. Otherwise, says van Aalderen, "we've got an office in India" where content is manually prepared for digital delivery.
In a third option, he continues, "you can either send them [PDFs] to us, or we can sell you the system to do it."
Content may be processed for output to "whatever channel you choose," says van Aalderen, citing such possibilities as:
* The Internet (a full newspaper portal with all Web functions)
* "Any E-Ink devices," including Amazon's Kindle (he counts 64 electronic-ink devices currently available, and said soliDAM is Amazon's "preferred partner" for the Kindle in Europe, where it was introduced this week)
* Any mobile device ("we've written an iPhone app that you can brand to your title")
* Even a Lexis/Nexis feed.
If a publisher prefers, soliDAM also will handle the relationship with the device maker and can supply an interface to a newspaper's subscription system to enable existing customers to sign up for an e-reader edition (probably at no cost), offer single-copy sales, and offer access to non-subscribers, possibly in ads by Sony, Amazon, Apple, etc. in print on a newspaper's Web site.
"We will take over the hassle of redoing it, over and over again" for each device, format and service, van Aalderen says.
Facilitating his company's work in this area, he notes, is the ePub standard, backed by big names, from Adobe to Sony to Barnes & Noble. The International Digital Publishing Forum devised the ePub open e-book standard to enable reflowing of content in order to optimize is presentation on a given device. Its specifications cover publication structure (a successor to the 10-year-old Open eBook standard), file structure in XML, and file-collection format (the "container," which also can support digital rights management).
Jim Rosenberg
(jrosenberg@editorandpublisher.com)
is a senior editor at E&P.
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