Is it Worth It to Pay for Adobe InDesign Software?
Adobe InDesign software doesn’t come cheap. If you’re a new customer, a full version with no student discount or anything, sells for $662. Is it worth it? Let’s take a look.
InDesign Creative Suite 5.5 is what you buy if you want to indulge yourself in any kind of digital publishing. See, we said digital publishing and not just publishing.
Because if you’re interested in getting it printed on actual paper, Adobe InDesign software is not what you need. There is nothing there for print publishing. Computer publishing is a completely different matter though.
Throughout the 80s and the 90s, everyone in the publishing world used QuarkXPress. And for those who still do traditional print publishing, that’s a product that’s still completely relevant. But now that a lot of magazine publishing is fought out on the Internet, Adobe InDesign software is a real force.
If you completely concentrate on online magazine publishing and you don’t really have a lot to do with print publishing, you probably have to give your product away for free.
And perhaps buying such expensive software doesn’t really make sense when you’re giving the end product away for free. And that’s not even it.
Since people do a lot of the reading on their iPads and iPhones these days, you’ll need to design your online publication for those kinds of devices, too. If you want to use InDesign to do that, that’s even more money.
On top of what you spend on InDesign, you’re going to need a subscription to Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite Professional Edition that involves hundreds of dollars every month too.
And if you have four computers running InDesign, all of these multiply four times. Even better, each time someone looks at your magazine on the Internet, you have to pay a fee to the Adobe.
It works out to something like $100 for 1000 issues downloaded by readers. If you’re unfamiliar with this kind of expensive software proposition, you have to remember that it isn’t something that just Adobe likes to do. This is the way the entire market works.
Thankfully, there are exceptions. If you want to just buy the software and you want to pay the software publisher for every single time someone on the web looks at your free magazine, you’re better off with software like Woodwing’s Digital Magazine Tools.
But if you do have your heart set on Adobe InDesign software, it can be a very powerful and fully featured application. You can’t go wrong with the industry-standard. But the money…
