After a decade's pioneering development in 'live' mobile publishing, Agfa Graphics is dropping its Eversify product.

The company has let it be known that it is stopping further development and worldwide distribution.

Existing Eversify customers have been told of the decision and are being supported in their migration to an alternative provider.

Originally an element of Agfa's Arkitex prepress workflow suite, Eversify offered publishers the opportunity to produce a tablet "edition" automatically, with CMS feeds (and also Adobe InDesign content) processed to become tablet and smartphone pages and features. Paradoxically however, it was a digital publishing product from a company whose primary newsmedia industry activity was in print production, a transition few companies have achieved successfully.

Agfa recognised the challenge and established a separate business unit for mobile publishing under Rainer Kirschke - and an identity which played down its parentage - but it was not enough to crack increasing market competition.

Kirsche says that after six years of business development, the demand for mobile publishing projects failed to reach volume targets.

"The continuous further development of new Eversify functions and the broad coverage of the e-paper to the pure HTML app/web could not exert a positive influence on the purchase decisions. The intensive market processing worldwide by sales and project management has made it clear, that very few companies in relation to the entire news media market really want to tackle the issue of digitalisation of publications and to make investments for the digital future.

"The amount of subscriptions is not increasing as expected by most of the publishers and the digital advertisement impact on the total digital turnover for news media is still below all hopes."

A range of additional features - such as in-app purchases and enhanced analytics - have been added over the years, plus of course, the established benefits of Agfa's expertise in image processing and repurposing.

Elegant new implementations have continued until recently, notably with the government-published Swiss Review for expats living abroad, which is published in 14 regional editions in German, French, Italian, English and Spanish.

Another is Brazil-based Revista Publish, a quarterly magazine that wanted a mobile version, despite limited inhouse capabilities. An Eversify app was created in two months at the end of last year, leveraging the advantages which have always endeared the technology to time-poor publishers (this one included).

Eversify has been delivering individualised solutions, opening up options for publishers by easily producing professional-looking content for all mobile platforms, and incorporating interactive elements.

"It was just what the publisher ordered," says Kirsche.

Just not enough of them.

Peter Coleman

Pictured: Pages from Swiss Review and a mock-up for Die Grüne Branche

• Agfa Graphics announced in October that it would migrate its mobile publishing activities to Twipe, which will support the Eversify customer base.

"Through this, Twipe strengthens its position in the German, Swiss, and Austrian newspaper and magazine markets and will guarantee business continuity for the Eversify customers," the company said.
Twipe founder and chief executive Danny Lein said the move will double Twipe's presence in the Grman-language market: "This is the first time Twipe has integrated such a large portfolio at once, and it will further increase our ability to scale our platform in a short period of time," he said.

Agfa says the transition will be completed by the end of 2017.