With the big money on publishing to Apple’s iPad, Adobe is showing that it’s caught on and is catching up.

Some of the big money going into the platform comes from Rupert Murdoch, whose iPad-only digital news product, ‘The Daily’ is now expected to launch before the end of the year. A team of 100 staff has been recruited to drive the new publication, which is expected to publish directly to the iPad.

Adobe says it has been working on undisclosed projects for major publisher clients, and that Apple has shown it is willing to negotiate an alternative to the AppStore model in special cases. “Newspapers want a yearly subscription model with readers they deal direct with,” says Adobe’s Roger Risdal. “That’s a negotiation you need to have with Apple, but with big publishers, it’s been OK.”

Sweden-based Risdal says he initially doubted the importance of the Apple tablet until he realised how it had been taken up as a reading device and saw the interest of non-technical publishing executives.

“I was coming back to Europe from an event in San Francisco when I noticed all the iPads lit up across the cabin,” he says. “They certainly weren’t surfing and most on gaming either. Then at IfraExpo in Hamburg it was the topic everyone wanted to talk about.”

With Risdal’s epiphany has come the realisation that iPad users spend more time with a tablet publication than on a website, thanks to the richer experience it delivers.

And after being wrongfooted over Apple’s exclusion of Flash, Adobe is coming to the party with a host of new initiatives aimed at wooing newspaper and magazine customers. It already offers a solution to the Flash problem with a viewer that runs on both AIR and iOS.

At its worldwide Max conference last month, it introduced a new Digital Publishing Suite which includes tools that work with its InDesign CS5 layout application and a hosting service.

Risdal, Adobe’s partner and business development manager, was at WAN-Ifra’s Digital Media Asia event in Singapore this week to expand a dialogue with newspaper publishers in the region. “We’ve been going out to customers to brief them, and to listen,” he says.

The pre-release offering “changes every month” as new components are introduced, but is currently available for free download for evaluation and comment (www.labs.adobe.com) prior to commercialisation in the second quarter of 2011.

Key elements include:

• an ‘overlay creator’ to accommodate interactive tools which add virtual viewing features Adobe calls ‘360s’, image and zoom pans, panoramas and a ‘web view’ feature into InDesign documents;

• a content bundler which gathers elements – also including video and audio – into a .folio file for uploading to the company’s Akamai-hosted environment;

• preflighting technology for issue files;

• digital content viewers including custom branded viewers for “all tablet devices”.

Risdal says Adobe will handle distribution and the “very complex” issues of delivering formats appropriate to each user’s tablet device. While creation of an iPad app will typically be the outcome, and the publication hosted in the Adobe ‘cloud’, Risdal says there will be exceptions. Some will have a subscription model “tied in”.

Adobe will also bundle analytics sourced from the technology of its Omniture acquisition.

It is also working with systems vendors to integrate its offering and technology into their systems, many of which use InDesign for layout.

Having realised that iPad publishing is its customers’ main priority, Adobe’s team is responding on-the-fly to issues as they occur. Matters raised by customers – such as interaction with social media – are being listed and responses prioritised.

It is, as Risdal says, an exciting development, but one thing is clear: Unlike the biblical tablets, none of this is set in stone.