Adding to the Platform Potpourri: Kindle HD, Surface and iPad Mini

November 19, 2012 By James Sturdivant

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In September, Amazon announced several new tablets, including the 7-inch and 8.9 inch Kindle Fire HD, which, along with Microsoft's new Surface tablet, are expected give Apple's iPad Mini a run for its money this holiday season. Appearing along with the Kindle Fire HD at launch were new tablet editions of Better Homes & Gardens, Reader’s Digest, National Geographic, and several Condé Nast titles, all powered by Adobe's digital publishing software and optimized for the Fire's 4G LTE wireless and Wi-Fi, HD display, high-performance processor and dual stereo speakers.

Publishing Business Today asked Lynly Schambers-Lenox, Group Product Marketing Manager, Digital Publishing at Adobe, for her take on the new crop of smaller tablets and what they mean for publishers.  

Publishing Business Today: Why do you think 7'' devices like the Kindle Fire HD and iPad Mini are here to stay?

Schambers-Lenox: Portable, lightweight, support positive reading experience. Clearly Apple felt they needed a smaller tablet that could compete with Kindle Fire in price. Kindle Fire has made significant inroads in penetrating the mid-size tablet space.


Publishing Business Today: What are the unique opportunities for magazine publishers on smaller tablets?

Schambers-Lenox: I think the optimal opportunity is for publishers to widely distribute their content across a wide variety of devices, regardless of size. Hence we are seeing leading publishers make their content available on all leading tablets and smartphones. Adobe is squarely focused on optimizing the publishing process for our customers so they can efficiently create and publish content to iPods, Kindles and iPhones in order to rapidly build their digital readership.


Publishing Business Today: What does Adobe's DPS offer that is especially tailored to the Kindle Fire HD?

Schambers-Lenox: DPS supports a variety of workflows that make it easy to create content for the Kindle Fire HD. For example a new feature now available is the ability to scale standard icons and assets to devices of different resolution and screen density. Publishers can create high resolution assets such as the “view” or “download” button in the library and DPS will auto scale it based on the scale and resolution of the Kindle Fire HD.