Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Best Practice Cases
Vendor Description

Vendor Name
Texterity
History and Background
Texterity was founded in 1991 by CEO Martin Hensel as a provider of SGML-related
professional services to publishers. As Texterity built its customer base, its offerings
expanded to include XML and text format conversion services. It developed TextCafe,
an automated document conversion technology, and began using it in 2000 to create
eBook files for its clients in a variety of formats. Texterity began supporting the Scalable
Vector Graphics (SVG) and Open eBook formats. Texterity moved into the Digital
Editions market with its Published Web Format (PWF) offering in 2003.
Texterity is based in Southborough, MA, with representation in Canada and Australia.
Vendor Type
Digital Edition Platform – hosted
Philosophy
Producing digital editions is a new area for many publishers. Print has been around
since Gutenberg, but digital editions have only been around for about five years. Some
publishers still question whether digital editions work, how people use them, and if the
model is sustainable.
Texterity tries to address these key issues using a collaborative sales and service
approach. Texterity representatives start with the business challenges a publisher wants
to address as well as the value-added opportunities that digital editions provide.
Texterity’s business model focuses on providing flexible business solutions that can
incorporate circulation-building programs, mobile phone access, revenue generation,
and completed search engine integration. Texterity believes that services around the
technology are as important as the technology itself; just offering the technology alone
is not a winning strategy.
Technology Description
Texterity’s flagship technology is its patented Published Web Format (PWF). PWF takes
PDFs from publishers and creates a digital edition of a publication that is hosted on
Texterity’s servers and can be viewed in standard Web browsers with no plug-ins
required. PWF is based on a combination of HTML, JavaScript, and XML, including
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), the W3C standard for expressing graphics in XML.
Unlike other formats, PWF does not require Flash; this means that it can run on
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