EPublishing – Threat or Opportunity for Traditional Printers

iPads, iPhones, and the glut of diverse tablet gadgets presently hitting the marketplace are converting the manner many human beings look at publications. An increasing variety of people find that the use of cellular gadgets to get entry to a wide range of cloth (regularly at the same time as commuting) is greater convenient than magazines, newspapers, and different conventional print media. The brilliant display screen resolution has promised to make the iPad the brand new medium for reading magazines.

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For some printers and publishers, this previously inexperienced trend is a supply of problems, even worry. But is that this worry well-founded? Was the initial buzz around the iPad and magazines only a fad? Is this a risk or opportunity to the print enterprise?

After all, there seems to have been a downward trend in iPad mag subscriptions after the initial frenzy. When Wired released their iPad magazine in June 2010, they offered greater than one hundred,000 ‘copies.’ But more recently, it has been suggested Wired’s iPad mag only bought a mean 31,000 copies in keeping with the month in Q3/10. Falling similarly to 22,000 and 23,000 for October and November, respectively. Vanity Fair fared no higher and has seen declines in iPad income from 10,500 in August, September, and October to eight, seven hundred copies of its November problem. Glamour dropped around 20%, Men’s Health has skilled a 28% drop, and GQ has lost buyers. Fewer and fewer human beings appear to shop for digital magazines for the iPad.

So is this a signal for destiny? Does it mean printers and publishers need now, not fear? With the glut of tablets and smartphones expected on the market in the near destiny and the lowering entry cost, I am positive there’s a long-term future for ePublishing. And for printers and publishers with vision, ePublishing should be visible as a way of complimenting their ‘ink-on-paper publishing – it’s a danger to get ahead of the competition, to take benefit of lower distribution prices, boom reach, and create new revenue streams.

There are various alternatives for presenting the material, so it can be considered on the mobile devices flooding the marketplace. The simplest approach is to make your pdf print fabric ‘appear to be a mag or e-book,’ and there are various cheap software program packages that assist you to flip your pdf files into ‘web page flippers.’ In reality, maximum machines, whether iPads, iPhones, or capsules, have a super guide for viewing pdf files natively inside their environments.

1. Provide a link to a PDF report from a present internet site. Most tablet devices have the capacity to download and consider PDF files easily, so this is a simple technique if people are already journeying to your internet site.

2. Make your PDF downloadable from the Apple iTunes shop as an “App.” There are many alternatives for converting a PDF record to a “page flipper” app, indexed on the iTunes store. While this can offer a degree of advertising publicity, it’s far uncertain how much gain this gives as it can wander away from the various 2 hundred,000 games and other apps within the iTunes Store.

To list packages at the iTunes save, it’s far necessary to open an account with Apple, which entails sending various office work and corporation info to Apple.

One disadvantage is that applications for iPad and iPhone devices will no longer run on non-Apple gadgets. This is a critical issue if one considers the number of carriers and projected boom for Android-primarily based telephones and capsules.

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Three. An alternative to creating Apps is to submit e-books. Apple gives steerage on how to do this. Their pointers are that if the text is the star of your presentation, use the ePub format, but if the layout is crucial, then use pdf files. Both of them may be published thru the iTunes provider as a virtual eBook.

To list an eBook with iTunes, you want to open an account with Apple, and also you want to get an ISBN range on your guide. This isn’t necessarily an easy technique. The important benefit is that you will be listed as an ebook instead of an App, which may have credibility implications.

Limitations of Page Flippers, Unfortunately, maximum readers are experienced with the internet and are now not glad about simple pages of text intermingled with pics. They want websites that permit them to “do stuff.” They want to watch motion pictures, go looking through content, get admission to related data, “browse,” discover prices, buy things they prefer, and observe their whim. They often are not happy to flip back and forth thru pages.

To meet those expectations, an exceptional approach is required. While there are numerous possibilities, the bendiest and most powerful method is to convert your utility to a “Web App.” In easy terms, a Web App is a website that can be allotted or accessed as though it had been an application running at the cell tool.

Rather than being an easy “web page flipper” for viewing a PDF report, a Web App has the capability to include more capability. Such capability may be associated with improving the user’s experience (for instance, inclusive of films, menus, links, and interactive capabilities), or associated with producing sales from the document (targeted advertising, or the ability to make purchases directly from within the publication), or related to supplying a useful service to the reader (calculators, access to facts, Facebook connections, and so on).

However, with the right improvement device, you may flip your ebook into a splendid looking Web App with a degree of first-rate steady together with your revealed guide(consisting of a preference of up to a few,500 fonts) – ‘re-purposing your layout and print attempt to more than one electronic transport systems consisting of the net, pills, and smart-phones utilizing various operation structures (e.g., Apple iOS, Google Android, Windows Phone), and also from the Internet.

With an approach that ‘is going past page-flipping,’ you may attain large industrial benefits that include multiplied revenue opportunities, such as a. Regionalise advertising and marketing, i.e., offer classified ads unique to the place the person is having access to the publication b. Introduce a “click via” payment gadget for advertisers. When a reader clicks to a specific advertiser’s entry, you are capable of price for this (much like Google Adwords) c. Place only a brief version of your book online to lure readers to i. Subscribe to the broadcast version, or ii. By putting the ebook behind a price gateway, have readers buy the present-day online e-book or subscribe to destiny online versions.

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Maintain the high-quality ‘appearance and feel of your book. With the ever-increasing array of digital gear on which human beings are gaining access to the web, it’s miles vital that first-rate courses be offered professionally. What might also appear first-rate on a computer screen from a website will now not translate to a without difficulty viewed the presentation on a smartphone or tablet.

Timothy Washington
Hardcore internetaholic. Social media nerd. General writer. Freelance travel junkie. Music practitioner. Twitter guru. Alcohol maven. In 2008 I was writing about wooden trains for fun and profit. Earned praised for my work researching fatback in Los Angeles, CA. Spent 2001-2006 lecturing about walnuts in Cuba. Earned praise for analyzing tattoos on Wall Street. Uniquely-equipped for deploying wooden horses in Jacksonville, FL. Spent a year lecturing about tar in Salisbury, MD.