2017

Assessing your customers' needs
It's probably safe to assume that you want your customers to have a positive experience
with your content. To make sure this happens, consider questions such as the following:
• Do your customers want to be able to change the point size of the text? If so,
consider a format that includes a reflow view.
• Will your consumers be able to download your content when they want to? For
example, if you want to download an app and its content over a low bandwidth
(like mobile networks), you want to make sure that the app is downloadable easily.
You can consider a light-weight format such as ePub or try to minimize the size
of any multimedia assets you include in your apps.
• How quickly will your customers want to be able to download your content? Even
on an unrestricted network, you might want to think about keeping the size of
your files as small as possible, in order to prevent your customers from becoming
frustrated with the wait.
• In what languages do your customers want to read your content? If you want to
distribute content in multiple languages, you should make sure that the format
and device you choose support those languages. For example, some East Asian
and Eastern European languages use characters that are not available in many
Western fonts, and some languages are read in different directions than Western
languages. The ePub format supports East Asian and Eastern European languages
on some devices, but it may not support them on all devices. If you want to use
App Studio, you must use only the layout view, because special characters may
not display correctly in reflow view.
• Do you expect your customers to have an Internet connection when they're
consuming the content? If so, you should make sure your content behaves
gracefully when customers don't have access to a network. If you create HTML5
interactivity, you can provide a default or "fallback" image or other graphic element
in each spot where you display content live via the Web.
For more information about the formats discussed here, see "Hardware, operating systems,
and formats."
Planning for distribution
Just as there are many different ways to distribute print content, there are many
different ways to distribute content for handheld devices. The way in which you choose
to distribute your content probably depends on what that content is for and how you
plan to generate revenue.
Consider how often you plan to release content:
• Do you need to distribute small amounts of content on a frequent basis? If so,
you might want to consider publishing content on News reader apps like Apple
News, Flipboard, etc. This approach gives you continuous publishing, and revenue
can come from both advertisements and the content you publish.
10 | DIGITAL PUBLISHING WITH QUARKXPRESS 2017
DEFINING YOUR GOALS AND LIMITATIONS