But there's an equally important logistical question that has to be addressed before publishers can do anything else: How do you build it in the first place?

Three of the magazine world's early iPad adopters -- Time Inc.'s Time magazine, Men's Health from Rodale and Bonnier's Popular Science -- walked us through their processes.

POPULAR SCIENCE

1. Bonnier calls its platform for iPad editions Mag Plus. Popular Science art and editorial staff work with a dedicated Mag Plus production staff to transform each print edition into an iPad edition, the first step of which is moving each page of editorial content, which starts out formatted as an Adobe InDesign file, into a Mag Plus InDesign template.

2. Once the Mag Plus InDesign files are in the template, they are imported into an authoring tool -- essentially a program for viewing, editing and enhancing the content -- using a file format Bonnier calls MIB, for Mag Plus Issue Bundle. Designers put thought and work into designing beautiful layouts for the iPad format, adding extra photos or other elements as appropriate. Editorial screens in Popular Science Plus on the iPad include the same elements as the print pages they came from but are not laid out the same way.

"The thing I think is really unique about Mag Plus is that we really emphasize design," said Mike Haney, deputy director of R&D at Bonnier. "We think it's really important that the magazine be not just a replica of what's in print but be optimized for the screen size, the interaction, the architecture."

Bonnier's Mag Plus platform gives editors and readers two layers to play with: one for images and the other for text. In Popular Science Plus, for example, a semitransparent layer of text overlays images and photos. As readers scroll through the layer of text, the underlying image might change to reflect points in that text. Those kinds of transitions are added in the authoring tool.

Points 3 to 5 and more .... http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=144151#