The Digital Zone at the London Book Fair looks stronger than last year. More on this next week.

Meanwhile Printweek have published a guide to "pre-media" at IPEX. I think the scope should expand to e-books and even the video etc for whatever a book is to be called on an iPad etc. there is a shift going on and even on a small scale the Book event is now including technology.

I have found out a bit more about Media Week. The logo includes the web address. Previously i thought Brand Republic was the most web sensitive aspect of Haymarket. But it is Media week that blogger Jo Francis links to when looking for a report on the iPad.

Just possibly there may be less demand for print if the iPad works out. That is the view from Media Week. Previously doubts were raised about the future of a paperless UK government. Gordon Brown is not always convincing, especially when there is no obvious policy on how broadband will reach the whole of the UK. But if Media Week takes a view then Printweek cannot be too dissenting. You might think.

I have put a comment on the Jo Francis blog linking to Alan Rusbridger in the Observer. He too has been thinking about the iPad and appears to consider 30% cost savings for the Guardian if every reader would accept digital delivery.

Will it transform newspaper finances? The Knight Ridder team worked on the assumption that it would – but only if you switched off the printing presses. Around 30% of the cost of a newspaper operation is tied up in the faintly Victorian industrial process of print, paper, trains, lorries, shops and – where they still exist — paperboys/girls.

The Knight Rider reference is back to Roger Fiddler and work from fifteen years ago. I came across this through the book Media Big Bang, published in Korea. It was given away for review during the first OhmyNews conference on citizen journalism. UK broadband is now just about where Korea was when Tackwhan Kim and Sangbok Lee were writing. It will be interesting to see how Haymarket works out a balance on print and Web ( OhmyNews house style by the way for the Web to start with a capital letter). I have started to follow both Printweek and Media Week on Twitter.

There is more detail now about CS5. Can't find anything much on Acrobat but there is something on EPUB from InDesign on InDesign Secrets-

Improved Export to ePub and XHTML. Did you use local formatting instead of styles anywhere? Don’t worry, local formatting can be maintained when you export to ePub or XHTML in InDesign CS5. Also, you can tell InDesign to use Page Order or XML Structure to determine the order of exported content. That means if you specify XML Structure, you get a chance to reorder, add, or remove content from the XML structure panel before exporting, giving you more control. We still think that’s a pretty clunky way to handle the export, but it’s far better than nothing.

So this is still clunky though it appears people like me who still use "local formatting" will not be totally confounded when it all vanishes. Still, the impression is still that this release is to move flat pages towards animation. Export to EPUB is not a priority. There may be something else that works well enough and could be cheaper. The prices for CS5 are an issue in Europe.

Meanwhile there is good news about Buzzword-

Buzzword integration. Are you a fan of Buzzword, the collaborative word processor program that’s part of Acrobat.com? We are. In InDesign CS5, Buzzword gets its own File > Place from Buzzword command. You can even choose to link to the Buzzword document, so that as colleagues update the shared file “in the cloud,” you can update your local file in InDesign. (Alas, any formatting you applied to the text in InDesign is lost, just like linking to Word files.) You can also export to Buzzword to create new Buzzword documents in your Acrobat.com account from the contents of InDesign text frames. Neat. Unfortunately, until Buzzword supports paragraph and character styles, this feature will have only limited appeal.

Buzzword, free online, has pretty good EPUB creation. The contents structure gets a bit complicated. But for a lot of people it may be good enough for shorter texts. Then some InDesign professional could rapidly render it all into a proper book.

It seems to me that CS5 is the end of Adobe Classic. More or less Macromedia in the case of CS5. Flash distribution assumed almost all of the time. I checked with the product timeline and it was the case that for the two previous Creative Suites there was a version of Acrobat just before the CS release. This time around the print production is not the issue. Acobat 10 looks as if it will coincide with web services of some kind towards the end of the year.

More surprising for me was the lack of mention of EPUB or the Reader for eBooks in the launch. Buzzword is pretty good as a way to create EPUB. My guess is that InDesign may not be really suited to the text structures required. Previous versions seemed not to be very prioritised on this. It may be possible but I guess InDesign is now intended for moving pages to Flash, showing off video etc.

There is a cost to CS5, rather high in Europe. Perhaps there will be some energy for looking at cheaper ways to cope with XML, PDF, EPUB, plain text and all the stuff Adobe is no longer interested in. CS5 will still be there when the Apple crowd have worked out what to do with Flash.