Nothing beats a magazine that you can hold in your hand, flip through pages or set down and pick up later (wait, isn't that the argument for physical newspapers?). A digital version of your magazine, however, is sure to attract online readers who are not subscribers and who can't or don't pick it up at the local bookstore.

Many magazines offer a large amount of their content online, either for free or through paywalls. But very few offer a physical copy of the magazine online. Seems like a no-brainer right?

A digital magazine can be as simple as a PDF of the final layout, which most mags have lying around anyway. Or it can be jazzed up with Issuu, which takes a boring PDF and spices it up with interactivity, animation and a user friendly layout. Issuu also has a lot of interesting magazines that can be browsed for free, including 20 Minuten which looks great in its digital form.



An online version of Fortune Small Business, powered by Olive Software, lets users zoom and flip through its pages, using a Flash-based navigation. (The company also does newspapers.) Space Magazine has made use of the Google Maps API to create an interactive magazine that functions much like a Google Map. I'm still not sold on the tiling effect or the odd navigation, but it sure does look good and is very avant-garde.

Pdf-mags.com has an impressive collection of about 175 magazines that are both online and free. A list of its offerings reveals that it is comprised of mostly niche magazines, but still impressive nonetheless.

Traditional magazine readers/ citizen journalists are taking the web 2.0 route and creating online magazines that, like my fave CRAM Magazine, are really impressive in both writing and design. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Putting an entire magazine online for free is the next step in online journalism, but is sure to tick off more than a few subscribers who are paying for exclusive content. It is up to your company to decide whether such a commodity should be free, an online bonus, or available for a fee.

Labels: pdf

The advantage of reading news on the net is that anyone can read exactly what they want without leafing through huge newspaper pages or sitting through long broadcasts. A PDF version of a newspaper is a great way to bridge the gap between the print and online product and gives readers the news they want in a compact format.

A PDF or Portable Document Format is a file format developed by Adobe that packs text, graphics and fonts into a single file. A PDF document is somewhat similar to HTML and may contain hyperlinks and multimedia elements and can be downloaded and printed or saved for later reading.


Metro Newspapers offers PDFs of its Silicon Valley, Santa Cruz, and North Bay California papers. The UK-based Telegraph has archived PDF versions of its afternoon paper Telegraph pm as does the Santa Monica Daily Press. Find more magazine PDFs here.

So how do you do it? A talented copy editor can layout selected stories and images and, depending on the program being used, export the file to Adobe PDF. The file can be uploaded to your site and made available as a link.

If you don't have a copy editor to spare, xFruits offers a unique tool that converts your RSS feeds into a handy, though not as visually appealing, interactive document in a few minutes. Imagine offering users a sports section dedicated exclusively to their favorite team, based on an existing RSS feed. In order to work properly, the RSS feed must include content, not just a link to the article. Check out the xFruits-created 10,000 words PDF here.

Labels: pdf, rss