Gilbane Research Report - Digital Magazine Editions - (Page 120)

Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Visionaries Peter Meirs Digital Alternatives Peter Meirs is the Vice President of Production Technologies for Time Inc. and an affiliate of the MIT Media Lab. He currently oversees digital magazines, emerging media technologies, the Time Inc. digital archive group (E-MaG), the Digital Development Group, and the OMS Print group. Peter is also a founding member of the PRISM XML standard working group and has responsibility for Time Inc.'s efforts with electronic insertion orders and the AdsML advertising specification. Since joining Time Inc. in 1992, he has overseen its digital advertising and transmission systems, directed TIME Magazine Editorial Operations, and managed Time Inc.'s conversion to a fully digital production workflow. Peter is a frequent speaker at industry events on the subject of digital publishing technologies. Peter Meirs is one of the publishing industry’s leading visionaries. He is a strong proponent for technology that supports publishing efforts such as XML and content management systems. He and his team have built a comprehensive archive of Time Inc.’s content and implemented a digital asset management system to manage their massive collection of illustrations and rich media. He is a key advocate and resource for the Web sites that serve the corporation’s impressive set of brands and publications. He is a consummate technology buff and he is so well known that his biography appears in Wikipedia. The one sort of technology that he doesn’t really like very much is digital replica editions which he describes as putting a piece of glass in front of a print magazine. To help understand his misgivings, he provided a summary of his experience with digital replica editions. He started investigating digital replicas in 2000 by conducting a complete analysis of the market, other publishers’ efforts, and the digital replica publishing engines. In 2003, they launched the digital replica edition of Popular Science. They signed up about 1,000 digital subscribers, 400 of whom were international. Time Inc’s legal department had concerns about the international digital distribution of its content. The digital replica was not promoted very enthusiastically and was not even on their Popular Science Web site as a subscription option. At its peak, digital subscription reached 3,000 copies. For other publications such as Cottage Living, they created a digital edition for promotional purposes. In a recent presentation at PubExpo in March 2008, Meirs and his colleagues voiced their conclusion that there simply is not sufficient demand for digital replica editions. How does he explain his enthusiasm for publication Web sites and his disdain for digital replicas? Part of the issue involves the strictures involved to keep a digital edition auditable so that they account for circulation numbers. The requirement that the digital pages be identical to the printed pages makes it difficult to display the ©2008 Gilbane Group, Inc. 120 http://gilbane.com http://gilbane.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Gilbane Research Report - Digital Magazine Editions

Gilbane Research Report - Digital Magazine Editions
Table of Contents
Introduction
Section One: The Data
Section Two: Best Practice Cases
Nxtbook
Bentley Systems
Graduate Prospects
Hearst
Information Today
Marine Log
Vendor Description
Section Three: Buyer’s Guide
Section Four: Visionaries
Section Five: Conclusions
The Authors
About the Gilbane Group, Inc.
Our Sponsors

Gilbane Research Report - Digital Magazine Editions