Publishers to weather changes at Seybold
As they prepare for the latest round of seminars and product announcements from the field's leading vendors, publishing professionals face some substantial questions about the very future of their industry.
Not that there's reason for depression: The frenzy of the dotcom age has galvanized the market. Visitors to the Hynes Convention Center this week will be as preoccupied with the demands of e-commerce as they are with more traditional DTP tasks such as finding the perfect Portable Document Format (PDF) work flow for their prepress projects.
Those new challenges have added a new layer of complexity to the publishing market. Thanks to the Web, professionals traditionally responsible for solving print-based production problems now face additional, more-elusive hurdles. What's more, the print-related questions they've tackled over the past decade haven't vanished into thin air just because the Web has evolved from interesting technology to a billion-dollar industry in a few years.
To put it succinctly: The publishing industry is painfully aware that the age of certainties has logged off for the time being. What's more, those technology issues exist even for professional users who are totally oblivious to the Internet. Electronic publishing -- once a comparatively stable field after the initial upheaval of the DTP revolution -- has returned to a zone of turbulence that extends far beyond such innocuous questions such as what new features the next release of Adobe Illustrator may provide their design departments.
Enter Microsoft?
Let's start from the ground up, with operating systems. Now that Windows
2000 is just around the corner, the Macintosh -- still by and large the
standard for professional publishing -- may start to feel the heat. The new
version of Microsoft Corp.'s OS will offer native PostScript support,
OpenType compatibility and color management, to name a few new features
tailored to the publishing professionals who comprise one of the Mac's
earliest and most enduring core markets.
Will Windows 2000 emerge as a genuine threat to Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) market dominance? It's still too early to tell. In any case, it will be interesting to see how Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) pitches the long-delayed OS at Seybold. Whatever Microsoft's strategy, don't expect an immediate response from Apple: The company has apparently made the surprising decision not to put in an appearance at Seybold. Strange indeed.
InDesign redux?
OS issues aside, consider the range of software applications. A year ago
Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE) of San Jose, Calif., officially
announced InDesign, a
serious competitor to Denver-based Quark Inc.'s QuarkXPress in the
realm of professional-class page layout. Now, less than six months after the
program first
hit the market, rumors about InDesign 1.5 are gaining volume and
intensity.
The arrival of this first major revision should be a decisive moment in the Adobe-Quark arms race. While InDesign 1.0 is an interesting achievement, the real confrontation between the two programs will only begin once Adobe has delivered the refinements expected in its next rev -- and when Quark has shipped the yet-to-be-announced XPress 5. Perhaps we'll know a little bit more about both sides' arsenals by the end of the week.
Whatever news it provides about InDesign, industry insiders expect a busy week for Adobe. Among the rumored announcements: Version 9.0 of Illustrator, the company's venerable vector-graphics application; some formal announcement of Adobe's forthcoming work-flow technology, code-named Stilton, as well as new PDF workflow tools; and Ground Zero, a competitor to Macromedia Inc.'s Flash technology for vector-based Web graphics.
Any way you look at it, this promises to be an interesting week for print and Web content creators. Stay tuned for more.
Seybold Seminars Boston/Publishing, which is produced by ZD Events Inc. of Needham, Mass., runs Feb. 7-11.
Andreas Pfeiffer is an industry analyst and editor in chief of the Pfeiffer Report.