Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Best Practice Cases
Microsoft’s Silverlight Web multimedia platform). The publication is also easy to
produce, yet still supports important interactive features such as live Web links.
Advanced Publishing created a customized search presentation for the directory to
present results in specific groupings based on categories determined by the publisher.
The digital edition of the Donor’s Guide is an exact facsimile of the printed product,
except with live links to email addresses in listings. To produce it, Third Sector sends a
print-ready PDF to Advanced Publishing, which does the rest. Users can simply access
the publication from the Web site; no registration is required. The digital edition was
launched with minimal fanfare, other than publicity from the Association of Gift
Planners and Canadian Bar Association.
Results
� Readership of the digital edition has grown steadily to an acceptable level of 700
users per month who view the publication.
� Third Sector was able to achieve this readership with virtually no publicity.
Lessons Learned
� Despite the relative success with no publicity, Third Sector finds that it needs to
take steps to build traffic to the Donor’s Guide Web site.
� They also want to look beyond the print edition and consider how they can take
advantage of the Internet; the digital edition may become one of several avenues
for publishing the same information. They are considering online ads, online
premium listings, and other sources of revenue.
Gilbane Group Conclusions
� There is a viable role for digital editions in directory publishing, despite its
migration from print to “pure” online services over the past several years.
Digital editions can be particularly attractive to small publishers, for whom the
cost of converting a print directory to an online database – and hosting that
database – may be prohibitive.
� The DjVu format used by Advanced Publishing in this case turned out to be
ideal: it is used in situations that might otherwise call for PDF but features
much smaller page size while retaining such important features as searchability
and embeddable links. It is a good fit for a large publication meant for offline
reading.
16
©2008 Gilbane Group, Inc. http://gilbane.com