I was recently reading Dorothy Hoskins' provocative LinkedIn thread on Adobe's embrace of the magazine market at the expense of the educational publishing market and it made me think. So, the options covered in this thread are to work with Adobe by adding requests to their product wish list or have IDPF front an industry request to support merging standards, assuming EDUPUB rather than a better version of ePub is a standard worth sponsoring.

The real question is whether InDesign provides the capability of producing derivative structures that support different standards. It's not looking that way, not now. Maybe production editorial folks in ed publishing houses will embrace other options, like batch pagination systems as an alternative to InDesign. Or use off-shore vendors to force feed *ML through a few manual conversion steps to make ePub files. This push and pull between the making systems like InDesign and the market demands for multiple file formats from a single source puts production and editorial managers in a challenging position.

What's missing from this thread is how Component Content Management Systems (CCMS) fit in, where in the workflow they add value. As a CMS software vendor for some ten years, we at RSI, makers of RSuite CMS, see the movement from IT-based CMS systems, XML repositories with some workflow added, to robust publishing systems supporting a variety of editorial and production workflows.

Enter DITA For Publishers, a standard which RSuite supports which provides the extensibility publishers do and will need to connect editorial, production and the market demands for multiple file formats from a single-source. Click here for our DITA For Publishers White Paper.