Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Looking at digital editions

A press release in my inbox tells me that PennWell will begin publishing digital editions of four B2B magazines -- Laser Focus World, Cabling Installation & Maintenance, Industrial Laser Solutions and Vision Systems Design -- through Texterity.
And a quick visit to Texterity's site shows me the company has collected a slew of customers for its service of rendering print editions into pdf-like versions for the Web.
I've said that I'm not crazy about digital magazines. I prefer that people repurpose their content for the interactive medium of the Web. Nonetheless, publishers do seem to like these things. And now it's possible to get audited numbers for digital editions. So I suspect the popularity of these products will grow.
Given that, I have to say that I prefer the products created by NXTBook to those of Texterity. I just really like that audio file of a page being turned when I move through the "magazine."

4 comments:

  1. contract connected does the online magazine better than anyone else out there. all other's pale in comparison

    http://www.contractconnected.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. I wouldn't say that Contract Connected is the best of digital magazines.
    It is good looking...but that's because the magazine itself is good looking. And the digital edition is done in Flash, which is a good idea.
    But there's nothing else about it that jumps out for me.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I like how Contract connected is USABLE. It's navigation is very straight forward and you don't have to zoom in to read anything. It also seems to have more interactive pages, that can hold a readers interest rather than viewing a static pdf that is not legible.

    ReplyDelete
  4. You're right about that for sure. Nothing is less interesting that reading a pdf page.

    ReplyDelete