The company claims the “most-used tablet-publishing solution worldwide”,  and says its initiative will apply to publications on tablets running including Apple’s iOS, Android, Blackberry Tablet OS and HP webOS, as well as in HTML5 browsers.

PR 
manager Stefan Horst says standards will be established once markets are mature: “For print, PDF eventually became the de-facto standard and the web has been standardised from the beginning with the open HTML standard,” he says. “For tablets though, there is no standard format yet to describe the interactive tablet experiences, and as a result, there is a direct dependency between the creation tools and the tablet apps.”

WoodWing president Erik Schut says it is the company’s duty to catalyse standardisation of a common format, which otherwise could easily take a few years.

“Publishers will seriously benefit from standardisation, as it avoids vendor lock-in and allow them to pick and choose different suppliers and technologies for the various parts of the supply chain,” he says. “Both the tools to create your publication, as well as the reader apps for the various platforms can be chosen freely.”

He says WoodWing analysed existing and upcoming standards, as well as proprietary formats. “We came to the conclusion that our format is a good starting point for an open industry standard,” he says. “Being XML-based, it’s easy to transform from and to other formats to allow quick and easy interoperability.”

He says a pressing reason for standardisation is the many upcoming multi-publisher digital kiosks, which allow customers to shop for interactive magazines and newspapers from various publishing houses.

The compoany is already actively engaged with other leading technology suppliers to further evolve the format, and has invited others to join the process. More details are on www.ofip.info.