I n October 2013, IDEAlliance, a leading developer of best practices and specifications for print and electronic media, announced the first implementations of Version 1.0 of its OpenEFT format by eMerge Consulting and Hipzone. OpenEFT is the first open format specification for the exchange and rendering of enhanced publications on tablets and mobile devices. Rendering for editorial content, advertisements, rich media and interactive enhancements found in today’s tablet publications is enabled by this industry-created specification. Freely open to adoption and enhancement by all media supply chain partners, OpenEFT is a standard industry format intended to foster workflow efficiencies, technology innovation and reader engagement
“All across the media value chain whether it’s CTOs of magazines, production staff in the trenches, or developers of digital news stands — the absence of an open standard for multi-platform publishing is inhibiting the development of competitive, innovative production tools to support the creative needs of publishers and advertisers,” said David Steinhardt, president and CEO of IDEAlliance. “OpenEFT offers publishers the ability to produce and export their content, including all associated interactive elements, into one standardized format for display across a wide range of devices, while minimizing disruption to current workflows.”
First implementation demonstrations
According to Dianne Kennedy, VP of IDEAlliance Digital and Emerging Technologies and director of the OpenEFT effort, “One of the first questions I am asked is, when will tools be available? I am happy to say that implementation of OpenEFT is proceeding rapidly and less than two weeks after release of OpenEFT V1.0, public technology demonstrations were shown.”
The first implementations of OpenEFT were demonstrated recently during two industry events in New York City — first at the Create a sphere Digital Asset Management Conference on 8 October 2013, and at the IDEAlliance PRIMEX East Conference on 9 October 2013. The OpenEFT initiative was launched in April 2013 and over the pastsix months, an intense industry-wide effort engaged publishers, digital newsstands, and technology partners who produced and reviewed three draft specifications, leading to the release of OpenEFT Version 1.0 on September 30, 2013
The ability to write an OpenEFT package was demonstrated by eMerge Consulting. According to Michael Sweet, CEO of eMerge Consulting, “Employing our industry-leading XML Workflow platform Scriba XML, eMerge created a workflow that convertsInDesign layoutsinto OpenEFT packages. Using this workflow, it is possible to create HTML5 interactive content as well as print replica OpenEFT packages and other interactive packages.In addition, Scriba XML’s ability to automatically convertInDesign layoutsinto rich XML structures providesthe flexibility to produce a variety ofstructured outputs that publishers can use to target a wide variety of digital devices and channels.”
The first OpenEFT reader software was demonstrated by Hipzone. Joe Cha, CEO of Hipzone, demonstrated the reader using the Harvard Business Review OpenEFT output written using Scriba XML. Cha commented, “Hipzone actively contributed to the development of OpenEFT and is confident that V1.0 meets its goal of being simple and straightforward to implement. Our OpenEFT reader technology helps to level the playing field by offering other tool vendors an easy way to get started and by offering content creators who want to produce interactive digital editions, a viable choice to get there.”
