Digital Publication – Which Format Should You Choose?

With the surge in online reading the increasing amounts of time people spend on the internet, magazined and print publications are waking up to realize the enormous online readership they can tap in. however, moving from print to web is not an easy task. You need to make sure that you preserve the essence of the publication and don't end up making your readers feel alienated.

One of the most important decisions that you need to make is an appropriate digital publication format. There are 3 basic digital publication formats of which you need to choose one that best suits your needs and requirements.

Flip Books
Commonly known as digital magazines, these are just an online replication of print publications. They look just like actual magazines which allows users to flip through. One can just turn pages and view things just like they would do with a regular magazine. The layout of the page can be exactly similar to the print version. Moreover, digital magazines can also add multimedia content. This gives an enhanced appeal to the contents and tweaks user experience.

They are the best choice if you already have a print presence and want to an online format of the same. There are further several types of flip book solutions.

This type of magazine is generally distributed through email links. You can include a link to it on your publication website or mention in the print publication. Also, online advertisements are an excellent way to promote digital magazines. It is very easy to set up rights management for this type of files. In fact, you don't have to worry about blatant content theft. This is because the text elements cannot be copied and pasted onto other websites and the magazine files cannot be copied or saved. Moreover, you have control over the print quality of pages.

It is very easy to track click through rates in flip-books. You can get access to critical data like traffic reports and page views that you can further supply to your advertisers. You can also know the time spend by visitors on each page and from where they left the page altogether. This will prove to be valuable information for the advertisers to track what pages and ads are getting maximum viewership.

Flip-books however have their share of disadvantages as well, the most popular being that of optimization. Because most flip-books are build on Flash, search engine crawlers are unable to index it effectively. As a result, they fail to appear on the search engine results. Thus, if you want to popularize it over the Internet, you would have to take some aggressive promotion and advertising measures.

PDF Magazines
PDF magazines are the best choice for those who are concerned about their budgets. It is very easy to create PDFs and distribute it across the internet. You can distribute the links through emails and even send the PDF publication directly if the file size permits. There are also certain security settings that can control the digital rights management.
In order to view PDF magazines, users would need to download it. That is why it is important to consider the file size. Newer versions of PDF magazines can contain multimedia files and links as well even though it adds on to the file size. The best part about PDF is that search engines can locate them and index them efficiently.

Blog- and Website-Based Magazines
This is the most cost effective solution for digital publications. It involves the creation of a blog or website that contains all the contents of the magazine. Any professional service provider can help with the design and development of the website. It can have all the articles and images from the printed version.