Adobe's Digital Publishing mistake

The following situation described in the “The Simple Best” Web site is what we’re actually facing now and in the future. I wish Adobe can come up with a more realistic model that addresses the need of smaller publishers, especially the ones — the ones like us — that are not in a economic-scaled market like the United States.

Perhaps it’s foolish of me to be surprised by the extortionate software prices set by Adobe — it’s certainly their usual practice — but the shocking aspect is that Adobe are going to charge recurring fees on top of the standard software price. That’s totally understandable, since releasing an iPad magazine incurs a hosting overhead (primarily for in-app purchasing), but these fees are astronomical. Here are some of the figures quoted by MacUser, based on current approximate currency conversions:

  • £3636 per year (fixed) for the ‘Platform Fee’ required for in-app purchasing.
  • £3367 per year (minimum) for the’Distribution Service Fee’, which is effectively a downpayment for the £0.16 per issue Adobe will charge, starting at the minimum commitment level of 25,000 downloads (even if you hit nowhere near that amount).

That equates to £7003 per year as a minimum spend — irrespective of how many copies you sell, or how regularly you publish — and that’s on top of the one-off charge for the new 5.5 version of InDesign: £94 as an individual upgrade from CS5, £238 for a suite upgrade from CS5, and considerably more if, like me, you’re upgrading from CS4: £190 for InDesign on its own and £619 for the whole suite. Brand new, InDesign CS5.5 costs £714 and the suite costs £1810. That’s what you’ll be paying to Adobe. On top of that, there’s the 30% per-download charge publishers are required to pay to Apple (which, for the record, I regard as fair, especially as it’s considerably lower than what physical shops take for stocking your magazine).

To put that into perspective, if we released an iPad version of 8 Faces and charged £4 per issue, we would have to sell around 2700 downloads before we broke even, and that doesn’t even take into consideration the time needed to actually create the app, which I’d put at around three weeks. These fees may be a drop in the ocean for large publishing houses, but for those of us who publish on a more independent scale, we’re effectively being priced out of the market.