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
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