Join the Q

Regular readers of this site (you know who you are) will know my fascination with the Q Mags site and its collection of industry ephemera.

The latest titles to join the list are Desktop Engineering, Embedded Systems and the improbably named Policy Today, which thinks that "principled decision making lies at the heart of republican democracy."

Hmm. One for Mr Bush's desktop methinks

Top Shelf

Looks like the floodgates have opened. Zinio have agonised over the placement of er "specialist" men's titles on their site for some while, so its interesting to note that there are now over 15 titles in this sector, with adult content much to the fore.

Indeed, Playboy's Lingerie Special is now number one in terms of sales, compared with a year ago, when it was PC Magazine.

Hope those Tablet PC's are wipeable.

Make Do !

O'Reilly's excellent Make Magazine have an excellent digital version. You need to be a subscriber to get the full version, but you can still download some samples as a PDF.

The make blog attracts around 100,000 page views a day ; which is by my calculation around 100,000 more than this blog.

Digital in growth shocker !!

A report from Zinio has outlined the fact that digital magazines are increasing their penetration of the media mix (or something like that).

Key facts from the survey, grandly entitled "The Digital Publishing Report" include -

• 33.7% growth in number of titles
• 25.9% growth in circulation
• 38.4% growth in deliveries

Consumer publications have higher average digital circulation, though more business publications have gone digital.

Use of rich media in digital publications grew 188% from Q1 2004 to Q1 2005, based on the report.

Digital providers control the lion's share of digital magazine distribution. 85.6% of all digital circulation was executed with a digital provider rather than by the publisher using PDF.

The Digital Alternative

Nxt Books have announced that they are working with a firm called Digital Alternatives (posts passim) in the UK.

Alternatives will be targetting the B to B sector and have announced that they have already digitised BRAD, the bible of magazines, newspapers and periodicals.

What a service to humanity.

Paper ? Pah

Nice piece by Seana Mulcahy on how digital is changing the way that people read their news.

Go here

IT's 100

Business Week are producing a special digital version of their IT 100 supplement.

This special issue covers the world’s top 100 technology companies. The digital version of the magazine is intended to showcase multimedia audio and video, including interactive executions of both rich editorial and advertising.

Sounds good.

Better late than never

Zinio has announced the signing of agreements with AccesoGroup in Spain, Zinio Systems Norden AS in Scandinavia and Taurus in Poland. Zinio said the companies will sell its products and services to magazine publishers locally and maintain online newsstands for direct consumer subscriptions.

Go digital - or your money back

Texterity are offering clients their money back if they are not satisfied with their move to the digital platform. Too good to be true ? Well, according to their spokesperson (the splendidly named Cimarron Buser - an anagram if I've ever seen one) the offer means "Within six months we will contractually agree to bring the digital magazine to a break-even point."

In English that means that Texterity agree to either a refund or that they will continue to work with the publisher free of charge to achieve success.

Of course there are caveats - the offer only applies to BtoB publications - but I think this is a good move. Texterity should be applauded for trying to kick start the market and it will be interesting to see how the other vendors respond.

Revenews

One of my favourite magazines - Revenue - is going digital with Zinio. This is great news for those of us outside the US, hungry for an affiliate marketing magazine that isn't full of smug self serving imbeciles telling you the blatantly obvious.

Like er Revolution for instance.

NXT Up

NXT Books has announced version 2.0 of its browser based interface. Promised improvements include a slicker interface, better graphics resolution and improved linking.

We shall see.

Citizen Caned

Citizen Culture, which apparently is a "magazine for the young intellectual" - an oxymoron if I've ever heard one - is aiming to go digital in September.

Good news you might think ; but no, this is yet another example of publishers reaching for the digital opportunity as a last resort. Evidently the New York based publisher is in "hiatus" following a disastrous debut on the newsstand, so naturally enough they are looking to a digital version to give them a more sensible cost base and a wider readership.

Which of course begs the question - why didn't they do this in the first place ?

Future Imperfect

Unbelievably, Future have decided their new magazine "Click4More" (sic) should be published on the NXTBook platform.

Having tried (unsuccessfully) to woo readers with a downloadable magazine on Zinio for 99p, they are now evidently changing tack and going for an online product with yet another propietary system.

Have these people never heard of open source ?

April Fools

Zinio's attitude to the UK publishing fraternity lurches from the ridiculous to the absurd.

According to sources, in the early days of dealing with Zinio in the US, you had to basically get on a plane at your own expense and then present yourself at their offices if you wanted to use the system - the ultimate in self referral.

Now, having puffed the launch of a UK office, it appears that they are using a third party to approach smaller publishers.

Which is particularly ironic considering that their agents appear to have handled no one smaller than Associated Newspapers.

Click2Bore

Hot on the heels of the demise of Broadband Now! comes the exciting news that Future are once again to turn their hands to publishing on the digital - only platform.

The project is imaginatively titled "Click4More" and is rumoured to be helmed by the former editor of .net, Paul Douglas.

Expect a design rich, content lite execution..

3.0 good reasons to try

Zinio have updated their reader to 3.0, and being somehwat of a purist in these matters, I was tempted to stick with the tried and trusted 2.0.

However, I'm delighted to say that the new version speeds up page viewing considerably, and although the shiny new toolbar is triumph of design over function, it is much more uer firendly.

Now all we need is some decent content..

New appointee for Zinio

Zinio have pulled in the former publisher of Popworld, Sarah Clegg, to head up their UK operations.

What's NXT for Advanstar

Advanstar selected NXTbook Media as its digital publishing vendor for its business publications, the company announced today.

Advanstar has had a working relationship with NXTBook since 2002, using its digital technology to help promote Advanstar’s trade shows.

The ones that haven't closed that is...................

Education, education, eduction

Good news for college professors in the US. Zinio are offering a sample issue of new magazine "Co Ed" (yes really), a campus oriented product that promises girls, sports, drink and more girls.

Miss Bryce, see me after class.

Time for a change

Folio has a great piece on Time Warners digital strategy here. Of particular interest is the fact that Time are using digital magazines as testers for possible print products - for example they have tested Your Diet as a digital offshoot of People and may launch this next year.

Pity other people aren't so bold.

Yes Dennis, I am talking to you.