Digital publishing news for July 9, 2013
iPad publishing for the rest of us. That’s what the Netherlands-based company Prss hopes to achieve with their new platform. Prss hopes to be faster than other publishing platforms and is encouraging magazine publishers to use them.
“Like Quark, Prss has its own type of file: .prss. These files are smaller than traditional magazine layouts because Prss reuses the same image for different orientations and uses algorithms to shrink their size. According to Elings, this can lessen the file size of retina-version magazines from 200 MB to 25 MB without visibly losing photo quality. The small file size is extremely important because Prss operates off the cloud and streams information, as opposed to downloading it.”
Prss has an interesting price structure. “Publishers use Prss for free and instead pay a small fee per download. They can decide whether to pass that cost on to consumers or to find other revenue models.” The cost per download has not be disclosed at this time. A beta test of platform is starting this summer.
Boost Click-Through With A Table of Contents
Adding a table of contents to the top of emails helps readers get to the information they want faster, according to ClickZ. Publishers are often skeptical that a ToC adds unneeded length to an email but Jeanne Jennings shares her experiences with developing newsletters. It all comes down to testing. In her lastest article, Jennings talking about the testing process, “neither what I believe, nor what the client believes, matters – what matters is how readers behave and what brings us closer to meeting our goals for the email newsletter.”
In her case study she shows that adding a ToC to one of her client’s emails boosted click-to-open rates and open rates. “My theory: it has to do with the preview pane view of the email, which I’ve found can have a dramatic impact on performance. The table of contents appeared in the preview pane view of the test version of the email, but not in the control. Since most email clients block images by default, the pre-header placement of the table of contents may have encouraged more readers to enable images to view the full email.”
[text_ad]
Link Building is Here to Stay?
Julie Joyce has a great article on why link building still matters. Joyce says, “the web was built on links. Links drive traffic and they boost rankings. They are how we tell a story. They are how we point people to things we want them to see and how we navigate through the endlessness of the Internet.”
She also cites these three reasons why link building will continue:
- “Google’s PageRank is based on links. If the importance of links is going to lessen, they’re going to have to rewrite the algorithm. If they wanted to do that they’d have done it already.
- Spiders use links to crawl the web just like humans use them to navigate.
- Links are a natural way we tell someone about something. When you’re writing and want to mention an example, isn’t it more natural to give the example site a link than to allude to the URL and say “hey you, go see if you can figure out what this URL that I reference actually is and look it up yourself!”?”
Joyce goes on to summarize that links from trusted high value sources will always be important.
New Editor at Village Voice
According to MediaBistro, Tom Finkel has been named the new editor of the Village Voice. “Finkel is a veteran of Voice Media Group (previously Village Voice Media). He served as managing editor of the Miami New Times from 1989 to 1997, then shifted to editing City Pages for four years. Finkel most recently served as editor of Riverfront Times, where he has been for the past 10 years,” reports MB.
