Adobe is one of the most important companies in this industry. The nearly ubiquitous Flash player has put it on most users' radar, but the Adobe's real mark is the role it has played pushing forward desktop and Web-based publishing.

Adobe was founded by John Warnock and Chuck Geshke, two former Xerox PARC employees who developed Postscript, a printer language that helped launch the publishing revolution in 1985. It was Warnock who convinced Steve Jobs to back the language in the first Apple laser printer. This, coupled with Aldus's Pagemaker software helped Apple establish the de facto Mac desktop publishing standard, which vaunted the company to national attention in the business world.

Today, Adobe continues to innovate in the publishing space. The company has introduced products like Acrobat, Flash, and AIR and continues to create great tools for anyone publishing documents and media in one form or another. But it's Adobe's recent announcement of its InDesign CS4 tool that could perhaps be its most important product when it comes to the future of publishing.

Over the last few weeks, I have written a couple of columns predicting that a new generation of smartphones and mini-tablets will eventually become mobile platforms for multimedia e-books. I also suggested that the days of the standalone e-book reader may be numbered, due to the potential role these emerging devices might play as vehicles for delivering next generation multimedia content and e-books.

But if these devices are going to emerge and become successful, we will need new publishing tools and standards. These will help publishers create rich content combining text, images, voice, and video, which can be delivered to a wide variety of devices, rather than being limited to a proprietary system like the Amazon Kindle or Apple iPhone. In the past 90 days, two proprietary formats have died (BBeB, .PDB) and two controlled DRM systems bit the dust (MarlinDRM and eReader DRM). More importantly, two closed systems have opened based on ePub and Adobe's eBook platform (Sony and Barnes and Noble).

Using ePub as the base standard and working with its own e-book platform, Adobe has given content publishers a very rich development toolkit with InDesign CS4, letting the industry create multimedia content for inclusion in all types of e-content and e-books. This is an extremely important development for the publishing industry, giving publishers a way to create rich content that could be used on various OS-based PCs, smartphones, and eventually mini-tablets.—Next: Smartphones and Mini-Tablet Platforms >