How do you publish to tablets? Via digital print, a ‘pure’ app or the mobile web? The answer from WAN-Ifra’s Stig Nordqvist was “all of the above”, but the avowed e-reader fan is still puzzling over “what’s an iPad for?”

What emerged during the day is that there are plenty more questions to be answered.

A panel discussion had Hussein Khalil of German workflow technology company OneVision using a creationist analogy to suggest we were only in day one of the tablet’s evolution.

Later, the philosophical advice of Gregor Waller, a former Axel Springer who now describes himself as an entrepreneur and consultant: “Avoid making the same major mistakes twice,” he said. Waller told how the German publishing giant had come into digital publishing late, but had caught up with major, but not always consistent, investment.

From head to heart, Stéphane Carpentier showed a range digital graphics with the ‘wow’ effect, created by the studio he created for Swiss publisher Ringier in Vietnam. Lower costs also had delegates gasping.

Tigerspike managing director Chris Watt had lessons from his company’s tablet experience with high-profile clients including ‘The Econimist’, the UK’s Telegraph Media Group, and Australia’s News Limited. He urged publishers to consider the savings from scale, and added, “Less is more… do a few things well.”

And finally, a different sort of hands-on experience came from Tony Samo, who as editor of technology title ‘Australian PC’ had launched an iPad app for the magazine two days before the iPad went on sale.

Not without a good deal of heartache, however: The “very expensive” option of WoodWing’s app service enabled the magazine to rely only on inhouse skills, but required three times as much layout as for print only, and a lot of debugging.

“I killed it after eight editions,” he says, “but readers revolted when we used a PDF version from the corporate magshop.”

A solution has emerged in the form of Adobe’s Digital Publishing system, but is not without compromise, with the problem of multiple layouts arbitrated in favour of just portrait: “We surveyed readers on the choice of a portrait or landscape format,” he says.

“Of course, they were split 50/50.”

Lots more questions and answers still to come, obviously.

The three-day conference concludes on Friday with a focus on mobile media.

Peter Coleman