Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Buyer’s Guide
Digital Edition Buyer’s Guide
Publishers that are looking to adopt digital editions should consider a wide range of
features when selecting a digital edition vendor. Here we offer a summary of the main
features to consider, including user interface, advertising opportunities, usage tracking
and reporting, and publisher interfaces for production workflow and subscriber
information management.
User Interface
Digital replica edition technologies have been around for several years, which means
that publishers and vendors alike have gotten some experience with user interface
features, including which ones are popular with users and which aren’t. Here are the
typical user interface features that you should expect to see in today’s digital editions:
� Single- or dual-page display: the ability to switch between “one-up” and “two-
up” page displays.
� Page-turning animation: most digital editions provide animation that resembles
page-turning when a user clicks on the lower right corner of a page.
� Zoom: the ability to look more closely at pages of a digital edition. Some
providers offer two zoom levels, while others offer more levels or a sliding scale.
Some digital edition technologies also offer pop-up windows with enlarged
views of discrete articles for easier reading.
� Interactive table of contents: many digital edition providers offer a table of
contents page with clickable links to articles.
� Clickable URLs in articles or ads.
� Print pages or articles.
� Email links to articles or entire digital editions.
� Highlighting text in articles or advertisements.
� Annotation: the ability to add notes or comments to pages.
� Bookmarks on pages.
� Search: search for text in the current digital edition or across all digital editions,
either all editions in the user’s own library or in all back issues of the title.
� Library view: view all the user’s digital editions.
� Social bookmarking: add bookmarks to digital editions on social networking
sites like Digg,
del.icio.us, etc.
� Ability to include new digital editions in users’ RSS feeds.
Digital edition vendors use different technologies to support their user interfaces; these
determine – among other things – which devices they can run on (PCs, Macs, iPhones,
etc.). Some choices are Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, SVG (Scalable Vector
Graphics, an XML graphics standard), and other XML schemes.
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