Dadich Is Not Anti-HTML

Wired magazine’s creative director — and overseer of Conde Nast’s digital strategy — Scott Dadich recently gave a talk at the OFFSET 2010 festival in Dublin. His talk of course focused on the successful iPad edition of Wired and the collaboration with Adobe, but I found the following bit (from Creative Review’s event report) to be rather interesting:

He then showed the difference between how the New Yorker iPad app is different to the Wired Reader because the content demands to be updated more – so it makes more sense to have a much more HTML-led content management system, rather than an InDesign reliant one.

So far the biggest criticism towards the Wired app has been the lack of text control, due to the fact that every page is basically an image, and so it’s impossible to resize text, copy it, share it, etc. And what Dadich says is true — for the “Goings on About Town” section of The New Yorker (the front section) all text is in fact selectable. But it needs to be said that all you can do is copy the text — there is no way to resize, or to directly share it, or do any of the things that most ebook readers let you do these days.

And since I’m on the topic of The New Yorker — you can read my initial thoughts on the first issue of the iPad edition here — I’m happy to see that they did not follow Wired‘s example when it comes to the method of releasing new issues. Instead of Wired‘s annoying reliance on a full app update, new issues of The New Yorker simply appear for purchase inside the app, same as all of the Time, Inc. titles. Let’s hope Wired turns to this method as well.