Adobe adds social sharing, iPhone support to DPS

Highlighting the momentum behind its Digital Publishing Suite, Adobe on Tuesday announced new milestones and new functionality for DPS designed to help publishers improve the reach and usability of their digital magazines.

Adobe also announced one big new publishing customer: Meredith, which said it will use DPS to produce digital editions of its consumer magazines including Better Homes and Gardens, Parents and Fitness.

At an event in New York, Jim Guerard, Adobe’s VP and GM of media solutions, shared three data points that he said underscore the growth of DPS in its first year:

• Customers have created more than 1,700 applications using DPS
• More than 25 million digital issues created with DPS have been delivered to iPad, Kindle Fire and Android tablets
• Approximately 120,000 DPS-based publications are downloaded daily

New DPS features include support for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The new Content Viewer will allow publishers to scale their content for the iPhone’s smaller screen. At Tuesday’s event, Conde Nast’s Scott Dadich and The New Yorker’s Wyatt Mitchell demonstrated an “experimental” version of The New Yorker tuned for the iPhone, with an accordion-like structure for navigating through features and sections.

Another important new feature is social sharing. DPS now lets publishers integrate buttons for sharing articles on Facebook, Twitter and via email. DPS renders a version of the article that’s being shared so that it can be viewed in a browser. Publishers can include a sampling of other articles as well as a subscription roadblock.

Wenner Media’s David Kang and Us Weekly’s Vicci Lasdon Rose demonstrated the social sharing features in the new iPad version of Us Weekly, which is debuting Thursday on Apple’s Newsstand. (The first iPad issue does not include the social sharing functionality, however.)

Allowing social sharing within the “walled garden” of a paid app has been an issue for many publishers.