Inkling® Launches Inkling Habitat™, the First-Ever Digital Printing Press for Professionals

Scalable cross-platform publishing environment brings the digital publishing transition to its next phase

SAN FRANCISCO and NEW YORK — February 14, 2012 — Inkling®, creators of the standard for interactive content experiences on iPad, today launched Habitat, a breakthrough software environment that represents the most significant advance in publishing technology since the advent of desktop publishing in the 1980s. Inkling Habitat gives professional publishers everything they need to create and publish media-rich interactive content for both iPad and the Web, without desktop software and without the constraints of the printed page.

“To reinvent the book, we had to reinvent the printing press,” said Matt MacInnis, CEO of Inkling, who unveiled Habitat for the first time today in a keynote at the Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York. “It’s not about replicating the printed page on a screen. It’s about making a first-class interactive experience on every device you target, and this is the first time publishers can do it reliably and at scale.”

Inkling Habitat allows publishers to deploy standards-based content that includes guided tours, 3-D exhibits, interactive quizzes, and high definition video, in addition to impeccable text content.
Everything can be instantly published—and updated—with a single click. Habitat will be available immediately to select partners, with broad availability later this year. “When Inkling debuted its first textbooks two years ago, we set the bar for interactive content experiences on iPad,” said MacInnis. “Now we’re setting the bar for how interactive content is built, providing the entire industry with a means to scale interactive publishing into a viable business for the first time.”

Open, flexible, and engineered for industrial use, Inkling Habitat is the first integrated publishing environment built for professional publishers:

• Cross-platform with a click. Click “Publish”, and Inkling Habitat automatically pushes updates to every target platform at once.
• Everything in the cloud. Teams of authors, editors and production partners can collaborate on projects seamlessly from anywhere in the world. Because everyone sees the same thing at the same time, it’s easy to communicate, collaborate and coordinate from first edit to final publish.
• Object-oriented content structure. On the world’s first strictly semantic publishing platform, content is treated like software, shifting the industry from a page-based model to a softwarebased model that benefits from decades of computer science advances.
• Automated error reporting. Every time new content is published, Habitat runs a set of tests to make sure everything works. Broken links, missing files and even glossary problems are spotted automatically.
• Infinite rollback. Habitat automatically saves every version of the entire project, every time. That’s a lot of data, but it means that nothing’s ever lost. Anyone can roll back changes anytime, all the way back to the very beginning to see how the project has changed.

Over the last two years, Inkling has worked with partners to build a labor force of many hundreds of skilled editors, designers and programmers who now use Inkling Habitat daily. Having worked behind the scenes to build over 100 Inkling titles, the industry’s leaders in digital content production services, Aptara and Innodata, are now ready to expand production on the Inkling platform.

“As Inkling extends its game-changing approach to all types of books, Aptara is expanding our dedicated full-service Inkling Design & Production Center to all publishers,” said Dev Ganesan, President and CEO of Aptara. “Our instructional and creative designers, content developers, and media specialists are working as an extension of publishers’ in-house teams, using Inkling Habitat to increase the volume and speed at which print-bound books are transformed into engaging new interactive products.”

“Innodata’s engineering and design teams have produced millions of e-books for a wide range of platforms” says Jim Lewis, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Innodata. “The release of Inkling Habitat opens new opportunities to create uniquely rich multimedia content experiences for all types of publishers and corporate enterprises, and we’re excited to work with a pioneering partner like Inkling.”

Open Air Publishing, a startup publisher of high-quality, digital-first books for the Inkling platform, has already launched three titles on Inkling using Habitat. Open Air Publishing’s titles have won numerous accolades and are top sellers in their respective categories in the iTunes App Store. “Inkling Habitat has given our company the opportunity to build something big quickly,” said Jon Feldman, CEO of Open Air Publishing. “Habitat not only let us produce the highly interactive experiences you see in every title, but it also gave us unprecedented speed to market in 2011. We launched three full products with a skeleton crew in just under 6 months.” Open Air Publishing has an impressive pipeline of additional consumer titles forthcoming in 2012.

Inkling Habitat is available immediately to select publishing partners. Interested organizations should register for the Early Adopter Program at www.inkling.com/habitat. The platform will be made more broadly available later this year.

About Inkling
Inkling is reinventing publishing in the era of iPad, and we’ve started by redefining the book. Starting with the world’s best textbooks from leading publishers, Inkling rebuilds each from the ground up into enhanced, engaging and interactive experiences. But it’s about more than just books. Look between the lines, and you’ll see a revolution in publishing: a new platform for creating, distributing and consuming media-rich, interactive content. Based in San Francisco, Inkling is backed by Sequoia Capital, and partners with the world’s leading educational publishers. For more information, visit www.inkling.com.

About Aptara
Aptara enriches content for capitalizing on all digital mediums. Providing full content lifecycle production – from content creation and design, to new media enhancements, content technology
solutions, and production for all mobile devices and platforms – Aptara develops innovative digital products that deliver content how, when, and where recipients want it, while providing publishers
renewed agility and revenue opportunities.

Serving 9 of the 10 largest publishers in the world, Aptara is a US-based company founded in 1988 around its unique publishing technical expertise. Our over 5,000 professionals are deployed globally to help content providers create, enrich, publish, monetize, and manage their assets in the digital age. For more information: www.aptaracorp.com.

About Open Air Publishing
Open Air Publishing creates original, high-quality how-to books that are designed and built exclusively for the iPad. Open Air’s groundbreaking digital books allow readers to touch, watch, listen and read as they master new skills and learn straight from the experts. Each publication is a beautiful and complete experience that combines the depth of a traditional book with stunning multimedia not possible on paper. More: openairpub.com