Digital Magazines 2009 — Supplement to Folio - (Page 20) When Selecting a Digital-Magazine Provider, Think Ahead In the most competitive category of publishing suppliers, the playing field changes fast. hoosing a digital-magazine supplier starts with the publisher having a clear understanding of current needs and long-term goals. Is the purpose simply to get a digital edition up and running online to displace the cost of print? Is it important to expand the advertising opportunities and grow the audience with rich media experiences? Or is it important to be flexible and “future-proof”— prepared to deliver enriched digital content on emerging output channels? The digital magazine industry has matured in the last couple of years, and the number of suppliers has grown. Hundreds of solutions are on the mar- C ket today, ranging from posting a simple PDF online or a page-flipping brochure-type of publication at the low end to top-of-the-line products with all the rich media bells and whistles and flexible formats available from full-service suppliers. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a publisher simply converting print content into a PDF or page-flipping digital brochure. It’s not a particularly exciting product, metrics can’t be tracked and reported to advertisers, and the content probably won’t be available to search engines. For a publisher with a small budget and few expectations, though, it can be a start. But it is what it is, which is not much. A publisher that plans to begin with a very simple solution, though, should think ahead. Publisher needs, and particularly the opportunities available, could be quite different in just six months or a year. So it generally makes sense for the publisher to select a vendor— a partner—that can meet or exceed current expectations and grow as the next steps in digital magazine publishing occur or are invented—especially considering the reasonable cost of service. Prices for converting a print magazine to a digital edition range from zero for free services (Warning—you get what you pay MANUFACTURING: A LOOK UNDER THE HOOD EXPONENTIAL ADVANCES in technology have, in a very short period of time, made today’s digital magazines rather amazing in terms of what they can do and how they do it. Nevertheless, some things in the manufacturing process can be improved to make it smoother for the publisher, easier for the vendor, and a better experience for the reader. A significant limitation today is the basic content and type of PDF file—often the PDF/X-1a—that the majority of publishers and printers use in the manufacturing process, according to Carol Werlé, CEO of Dalim Software, a German company that has provided industrial solutions to publishing and printing companies around the world for more than 20 years. “I call it a very dumb PDF,” he explains. “A document saved as a PDF/X-1a loses a lot of information—metadata—from the underlying document during the manufacturing process, while everyone today is trying to retain the maximum amount of that metadata when translating the file into a digital publication.” As a result, digital magazine vendors often must have someone manually re-key the missing data to attempt to restore the file’s integrity. Further, because a lot of that enrichment relies on manual operations, the digital issue that a subscriber receives one month might differ slightly from one received a month later. The URLs may react differently when clicked, for example, or links and shortcuts may change. “It’s very important for the reader experience to be seamless,” Werlé emphasizes. Using PDF/X-4 is a way to retain far more integrity in the documents than previous PDF versions, is a step in the right direction. Once most relevant metadata has been retained through intelligent PDF/X-4 production, further automated metadata enrichment at the digital-magazine production level becomes possible. -J.Z. 18
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