In the digital publishing industry populated by established brands such as Vook, Inkling, Kiwa media, EE, Aptara and not only, Publification is making its way up. Publification is an Estonian start-up, part of the Indilo Wireless group, offering an HTML5 based platform for authors and publishing houses to quickly and cost-effectively publish multimedia rich eBooks on iPhones and iPads. Later this year, Publification will add Android and Windows Phone 7 on to their product offerings.

The service, currently in private beta, entails paying customers and will soon launch a self-service publishing via the WYSIWYG web editor. With the self-service options, the customer will be able to upload the source files, edit the eBook with the web editor, and preview the work on iPhone/iPad and send it to App Store. The multimedia content supported with Publification includes pictures, audio, video, animations, hyperlinks, interactivity and social media connections to Facebook and Twitter.

The industry of digital publishing is greatly expanding and this statement is based on Forrester Research’s study revealing that currently the eBook market holds 1 billion eBook and by 2015 the number will triple. A significant part is played by the increasing popularity of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. At the moment there are 300 million smartphones in use and the number will almost triple by 2012 and 12 million tablets that by 2012 will reach a 70 million level.

The giants operate at the same level as start-ups, moving fast and adapting to market trends. Apple is currently creating a publishing tool that will provide templates to users for magazine creation that will afterwards be published by Apple and sold via iTunes by the end of this year. At the beginning of this month, Adobe released its own set of publishing tools for Android, iOS, and QNX tablets.

“With output aimed at Android tablets, including Motorola Xoom and Samsung Galaxy Tab, as well as RIM PlayBook and iOS tablet devices, the Enterprise Edition allows large publishers to implement a custom tablet publishing solution without disrupting existing publishing processes and infrastructure,” Adobe wrote in the blog post.

It is difficult to predict the future trends in digital publishing, as no one quite knows where consumers’ preferences are moving to. And there is also the rapid expansion of digital media that is helping publishers cut costs and appeal to a broader target. Yet, one thing is for sure: digital publishing is triggering copyright issues that have already caused a great fuss and will continue to do so without proper regulation an agreement between authors and publishers.  These are all aspects of an evolving industry that will have to get worked out, as new technology brings new potential for publishers and consumers alike.