If you publish magazines or journals, then it is likely that you are in an optimistic place at the moment; despite the fact that the circulation for some of your titles is going down and that there is a plethora of free alternatives on the web from competitors. So, why the optimism?

Because there is a growing choice of options available to you in how you publish your magazines to give your readers more choice and value in how they consume your content. You can publish them through a website, as a digital, page-flip alternative, through desktop applications, through mobile phones or through electronic reading devices such as the Apple iPad or the Amazon Kindle.

The choice that you have in how and where you publish your magazine in a digital format is a great opportunity and it also presents you with some challenges. For example, if you have decided that you want to publish an online magazine with a ‘page- flip’ feature, where do you host your content?
 

You can host it on your web server or via a hosted service. If the company that provides the page-flip software for your magazine hosts the content, then you are committing yourself to long-term fixed costs which might make the project commercially unviable.
 

Another choice might be the importance of deep searching across multiple issues of the magazine. Is this something which will be valuable to your readers? How do you make this work, because many off-the-shelf packages

These are questions that we ask our clients regularly to help them to prepare exactly what they want to achieve with converting their printed magazines into digital versions.
 

For instance, educational magazine publisher, Philip Allan, wanted to provide access to existing and new subscribers to their back list of A-level magazines for students and teachers to help them with their studies. We designed a solution which enabled them to digitise their magazine archive from 1993 to the present and provided an easy way for subscribers to search for articles they were interested in across all of the magazines their school subscribed to.
 

Ben Rudman, our sales and marketing director, recently wrote a case study on the Philip Allan magazines project, which points out that “Through pre-orders of the product, the solution made a return on investment very shortly after it was officially launched”.

Other choices you are probably facing concerns mobile versions of your magazine. The Apple iPhone is the current the favourite of the day when it comes to publishing content to a mobile phone. However, this area of publishing became more interesting this week with the news that software which has only really worked only desktop PCs and laptops, namely Adobe Flash and AIR will soon work on mobile phones.
 

This is an interesting time for publishers as they work how they publish their content in commercially viable ways. All of this technology is providing great possibilities. But, you have to know the right questions to ask so that it works for you and your customers.