Beyond textbooks, Inkling aims to revolutionize travel with Frommer's digital guides
Inkling's digital publication platform helped textbook makers move to the iPad. Now, the company is setting its sights on travel with the launch of Frommer's Day by Day travel guides for the iPad and iPhone.
Context & Ripple Effects
The playbook here was set years earlier: when Apple's tablet arrived, it was pitched as the device that would redefine print, and Inkling rode that wave by rebuilding textbooks for the iPad — the shift captured in the corpus' earlier Textbooks Up Their Game coverage and the original 2009 tablet-as-print-killer framing. With Frommer's Day by Day guides launching on iPad and iPhone, Inkling is testing whether its publishing pipeline generalizes beyond education into consumer reference content.
The pickup tells its own story: msnbc.com, paidContent, AllThingsD and Mashable all ran the launch on or about May 1, 2012, signaling broad interest in whether a textbook-platform company can carry a legacy travel brand into the app economy. That interest lands against a market where the iPad already accounts for 97% of tablet web traffic per corpus data — the audience Inkling is designing for.
First-order effects
- Inkling gains a second revenue vertical overnight: the same platform that moved textbook publishers to the iPad now distributes Frommer's branded guides to iPhone and iPad buyers, proving the tooling isn't education-specific.
- Travelers buying Frommer's get an interactive day-by-day format instead of print, tying the Frommer brand directly to Apple devices rather than bookstore shelves.
Second-order effects
- Rival print travel-guide publishers face pressure to find their own digital distribution layer, since Inkling has shown a legacy brand can be converted without building in-house engineering.
- Apple's storefront consolidates further as the default channel for premium reference content — reinforcing the iPad-first economics (97% of tablet web traffic) that made this launch attractive to Frommer's in the first place.
Third-order effects
- If Inkling's model holds across categories, legacy publishers stop owning their own digital transformation: specialist platforms become the intermediary layer between century-old brands and Apple's gatekeeper-controlled store, shifting industry power toward whoever runs the conversion pipeline.
- Vertical-by-vertical migration of print brands onto tablets points toward reference publishing being reorganized around device-native formats, with print surviving mainly as a legacy channel.
The trend: Legacy print categories are migrating one vertical at a time to tablet-first digital editions built on third-party publishing platforms like Inkling, with Apple's ecosystem setting the terms.