Half as Good, or Twice as Good?

Last year, we were thrilled to produce the Disney Marathon brochure in NXTbook format. For those intimidated by 26.2 miles, here’s your chance: The Disneyland Half Marathon Weekend, also in NXTbook format.

New Media and Old Media Unite.

Let’s hear it for Rex Hammock. Rex’s blog cracked the A-list of blogging Godfather Robert Scoble’s blog. While guys like Rex have been tracking guys like Scoble for quite some time, it’s very good to see the admiration of intellect is reciprocal. 

Digital Editions – the International Story

Here’s a nice comment from a German reader re: a digital edition of AUGIWorld Magazine. To be honest, we don’t spend as much time talking about the international portability of digital editions as we should – perhaps because it’s an "old feature," actually one of the first reasons publishers did digital editions. But that reason is still a big winner for anyone looking to expand their reach without increasing their costs.

Most months, 40% of NXTbooks are read by people from outside the US. These readers have caused us to add a stable of international resellers and to develop a wide variety of NXTbooks in other languages, including Catalan, Farsi, French, German, Japanese and Chinese.

links for 2007-07-27

• If you publish a magazine you should read this…
  Michael Turro posted two responses on our last post about the iPhone.. While we admit to being a bit less bullish on the iPhone than he, this essay is an absolute must-read for anyone considering digital editions, smart phone editions, or anything beyond
  (tags: digital+publishing)

Should Magazine Publishers Care About the iPhone?

Steve Jobs has said that the goal of the iPhone is 1 percent
market-share by the end of 2008. Some analysts have been so taken by the
shimmering device that they’ve bumped it as high as 2.5%.

Now then, here’s a question for all of the content producers
out there. If I were a writer and I came to you and said I had an idea for a
story that 2.5% of your audience would read, would you hire me to write it? Of course not. After all, the iPhone isn’t going to find you new readers. It will only deliver your content to a segment which most likely is already aware of your brand.

Steve Smith from min says, “Even if Apple hits its target of
selling 10 million iPhones in the next year, that still constitutes a pretty
narrow niche of cell-phone users, perhaps too small for most general media to
target with discrete development.”

Perhaps? This is the same Smith whom has historically panned
digital editions, even though many successful publishers move 20% or more of their
audience to the format. We’ll blame Smith’s more gentle treatment of the iPhone
possibilities on the fact that he’s a user of the iPhone – heck, he might be one of the
152 people who get the New Yorker cartoon via his iPhone. 152! Imagine the possibilities.

In the best case scenario, your content can be consumed by
many platforms, offering publishers the ability to publish once, syndicate many
times. After all, that’s what digital editions were originally designed to do.
And at least one digital publisher, Exact Editions, has a digital edition
format that’s looked great on the iPhone since the first bleary-eyed iPhone
user managed to turn his (or her) on (despite the claim last week from another provider that "This is the first time users will see a publisher’s complete magazine, as originally published, on the iPhone."). But designing content or software
specifically for the iPhone seems to be a bit short-sighted – unless you and
Steve Jobs are both happy with 1% market-share.

 

Making Money With Facebook

On the heels of yesterday’s post about NXTbook’s Facebook integration is this fine post about how to actually make money with Facebook:

Facebook has a huge active community. It is reported that of the 29
million active users, about half log in each day. This is a rarity
among Web 2.0 companies (comparatively, Google Videos has about 3%
active users). If Facebook
can convince its users to shell out $1 to send those silly virtual
“gift” images to each other, then surely a clever developer or startup
can find other approaches to earning money from a Facebook application
that do not involve just drowning their users in ads.

Due to the pace of innovation over the web, it is imperative that companies jump on opportunities like these as they turn up.

 

 

NXTbook Adds Facebook Integration

If you’ve opened a NXTbook recently and clicked on the LINK button, you may have noticed that in addition to our single click Digg and del.icio.us capabilities, we’ve added a single-click option to save content to one’s Facebook account.

This was an interesting decision for us – Digg and del.icio.us are far more content driven websites, whereas Facebook is about, well…. you! But in the end, the decision was easy. After all, last August Facebook was was the 7th most active site on the planet, with over 6 billion page views and nine million members, and judging by their Alexa numbers, that number is only going up. We’ve already seen that del.icio.us is a great way to get people to save and share content, and we expect Facebook to be the same as well.

A special nod goes to the client who first requested this feature. Graduate Prospects continues to be our most successful digital-only publisher, with thousands of readers in each issue every two weeks. You can check out their most recent issue (with the Facebook integration!) here. 

 

links for 2007-07-25

• ON•Q – Home Systems Demo
  Great example of using Flash animation to create an interactive "map" for the viewer.
  (tags: Flash animation)

General Practitioner or Specialist?

Most people have a family physician. This person is trained to diagnose and handle common complaints. This works most of the time. And when you’ve got something a bit "different" the wise physician refers you to a specialist. If you try and ask that specialist a question outside of their specialty, they usually defer your answer to… another specialist. Why? Because they know that’s what’s in your best interest.

What does this have to do with digital editions? A recent article by Folio’s Matt Kinsman discusses printers that are getting into the digital edition business.

Kinsman wisely points out why this makes sense to some: "There’s also a comfort
level for the production staff in seeing the same files used for both print and
online." After all, we’re generally more comfortable with our family physician, because we know that person. But isn’t the quality of care more important?

Here’s some things to note about the digital editions we’ve seen offered from printers:

1.) The content isn’t indexed by search engines. To Google, the digital edition doesn’t exist. This is because it’s created in Flash, but there’s no XML feed directed for the search engines to gobble up.

2.) They tend to open up as full-screen players without URL bars. When the pages turn, the URL’s don’t. In other words, it’s very difficult (in some cases, impossible) to allow people to share links to your great content. You’re missing out on the conversation of them Web.

3.) No ability for additional revenue via custom ads or sponsorships.

4.) No RSS feeds — which become more and more important every day.

5.) No widgets to promote the content. This puts more burden of labor on the publisher.

At the end of the day, just like a family physician can provide "adequate" care for most things, a printer can probably provide you with a digital edition that will look and read like a digital edition. How "adequate" that solution is, though, is largely dependent on your pain tolerance and how important it is for your business to be in top-notch health.

Animation Within a Digital Edition

Bad Flash animation is really bad. But good Flash animation is really good – tasteful, elegant and, best of all, it makes for a better user experience. Here’s an example where a page in a brochure was optimized so the reader could see highlighted areas on a house map. The features were then jump-linked to other places in the brochure.

The best part? This was created entirely by NXTbook Media from the original PDF. The client didn’t have to provide any Flash files or guidance. For more examples of how we give static PDF’s a jolt of animation, click here.

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