Kobo-owned Aquafadas has a strong hold in the e-publishing industry, and counts itself as one of the only companies in the business that uses InDesign at every point in the publishing process.

As a renowned provider of solutions for e-book, magazine and newspaper publishers, Aquafadas has a leg up on the competition with its mastery of InDesign, which eliminates the need to recreate a company’s content prior to its publication in another format.

Many companies use InDesign already, so a publishing company that can leverage this feature is highly valuable.

Aquafadas has been in business since 2004, and though it began publishing digital comics, and brought them to smartphones in 2006, the company has grown significantly since then, and today its business model is focused on meeting needs not addressed by competing publishing platforms.

One such need that has come up in the industry in recent years is the ability to create interactive apps to go along with the e-books and other electronic publications a company puts out.

In an interview with GoodReader at Digital Book World 2013 in New York City, Aquafadas’ general manager, Rainer Heckmann, explained how his company is meeting this specific demand, and many others throughout the publishing and e-book industries.

Heckmann discussed his company’s platform, established in 2010 and based on Adobe (News – Alert) InDesign, which “lets designers create apps and also create content for apps, without coding.”

Heckman also noted two new features the company has developed in 2012 – EPUB support, and Web reader technology – which allows the same file to be used in apps and within a browser.

“The good thing is that with our solution, you start with one source file, one InDesign file which can simply be the file from the printed book or the printed magazine, and you simply use InDesign tools which require no coding at all…to enrich it with interactivity,” said Heckmann.

Some options available via the Aquafadas solution are adding interactive games for children’s books, for instance, and “You can add read-aloud, so you use narration and the text gets highlighted while the narration plays.”

Aquafadas is excited this year for its new Web browser capability feature, which will help widen publishers’ customer base significantly, allowing companies using Aquafadas to “reach everybody in your audience, even people who do not have a tablet,” said Heckmann.

With the addition of EPUB support, Aquafadas is looking toward a bright future for the New Year.

“Publishers very often are not so eager to publish into apps. They think it’s hard to market,” added Heckmann. “It’s easier if you go for an existing output channel like Apple (News – Alert) iBooks or Kobo or the Nook, so the EPUB support was very important for us to add in order to enable publishers the freedom to publish to whichever channel they want.” 

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