ABC Interactive (ABCi) is working with Adobe to audit metrics provided by Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite, the audit board has announced.

Adobe Publishing Suite is a set of hosted services and viewer technologies that enable publishers to create, distribute and monetize digital publications and magazines on tablet devices and smartphones.

The news, along with the next generation of the Digital Publishing Suite, was unveiled at Adobe’s annual Digital Publishing Summit in New York earlier this week.

ABCi will "audit aspects of Digital Publishing Suite application development and the integrated analytics captured through the Adobe Content Viewer through Adobe SiteCatalyst," it noted. "In parallel to the platform audit, ABCi will conduct test audits of several publishers that currently use Digital Publishing Suite, verifying the ways the system measures and reports such items as the number of readers and sessions per issue, the number of articles read, and the average time spent with an issue."

ABC also announced it and Adobe are working with the MPA (the Association of Magazine Media) and its tablet metrics task force to help "establish a common set of standards and definitions that will aid advertisers in analyzing and comparing readership of magazines’ tablet versions."

The initial recommended metrics from the MPA include:

• Total consumer paid digital issues -- consumer paid subscriptions and single paid issues
• Total number of tablet readers per issue -- issues opened by individual devices
• Total number of sessions per issue -- aggregate number of times an issue was accessed
• Total amount of time spent per reader per issue -- time spent (on average) with an issue across the total audience
• Average number of sessions per reader per issue -- the average number of times each reader accessed the issue

ABC has already outlined new requirements for magazine publishers to report digital traffic, which will take effect if approved at the auditor's next board meeting.