Tag: digital magazine

What is a digital magazine?

A digital magazine is a magazine formatted for the Internet and related devices.

Digital magazines began as PDF documents read on desktop and laptop computers. Today, digital magazines include rich-media from audio to video content, allowing for interactivity on touchscreen devices like the iPad. There are four types of digital magazines:

Digital Magazine App

A digital magazine app is the magazine that you read on your iPad, Kindle or other tablet-like device. It can still be held in your hands, but it can’t be paged through. The most popular digital magazine apps, in order of least interactive to most interactive: digital replicareplica-plus and reflow-plus, and they’re available in the Apple, Kindle and Google digital newsstands.

Digital-Only Magazine App

A subset of the digital magazine app is the business model that does not include a print version at all. Many publishers resorted to digital-only when print failed them, but more recently consumers have been drawn to digital-only magazines on their own. That’s why we don’t see the digital-only magazine app as a survival strategy, as it once was, but rather, drastic innovation and serving the needs of a beckoning digital audience.

Web Magazine

Web magazines aren’t formatted for a tablet and they can’t be bought in an app store. They are available through a magazine subscription website, where the user can view an issue of a magazine—one that is linear and periodic, has pages and a regular frequency, and can be viewed in responsive HTML on any desktop or mobile device at any time. There’s nothing to download. Publishers of web magazines usually generate their revenue through subscribers and may also take advertisement, however that’s not typically a given, like it is for print, digital and digital-only magazines.

Online Magazine Archive or Library

Typically, when you’ve digitized your magazine into an online magazine and have organized an online magazine team, it’s remarkably simple to create an online magazine  library or archive. This is available through your magazine subscription website just like the original web magazine. Users have access to old articles up until whatever date you choose. The online magazine archive is typically an upsell to your online magazine subscription and offered at an additional price per month or year.

Are you looking to launch your own digital or online magazine? Mequoda can guide you through the process. Download one of our free reports. 

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