We are in the mid­dle of a tran­si­tion for the pub­lish­ing indus­try that we are inter­pret­ing dur­ing our work as con­sul­tants and App devel­op­ers for pub­lish­ers. The tran­si­tion is based on the assump­tion that dig­i­tal media is a brand new dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nel that will rep­re­sent large mar­ket shares and a big source of rev­enue, but the media and pub­lish­ing Com­pa­nies have still not clear ideas on the approach they have to use.

In a series of arti­cles we will make a com­plete review of our expe­ri­ence with up to date infor­ma­tions and mar­ket data on all the dif­fer­ent aspects of pub­lish­ing on the new media.

We will also be pub­lish­ing theP­rint­Labs mag­a­zine on the iPad, where read­ers will be able to read about pub­lish­ing, tech­nol­ogy, adver­tise­ment plat­forms and mod­els, mee­tups and con­fer­ences you may want to attend to.

Dig­i­tal mag­a­zines pub­lish­ers are cre­at­ing a lot of buzz about their plans to project major changes to their dig­i­tal edi­tions. We are hear­ing of Condé Nast still on the talks with Adobe to try to get rev­enue from the dig­i­tal strat­egy that is start­ing to prove some tired­ness. Omni­ture ana­lyt­ics data are going to be expanded to try to catch adver­tis­ers atten­tion around the dig­i­tal ver­sions, to show them real cir­cu­la­tion fig­ures and con­tent appre­ci­a­tion ratings.

It is not easy to under­stand the busi­ness of con­vert­ing a printed mag­a­zine to a dig­i­tal edi­tion, even if we can now count on at least one year of expe­ri­ence and test­ing con­ducted by large pub­lish­ers. What we know for sure tough, is that the con­ver­sione from printed to dig­i­tal mag­a­zines is risky.

Our strate­gic plans for our cus­tomers about dig­i­tal mag­a­zines are based on the con­sul­tancy and ser­vice nec­es­sary to do the switch to a new model of con­tent cre­ation based on the use of a unique and cus­tomized con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem that is able to pop­u­late the issue con­tent inside a cus­tom made and branded viewer App.

Con­tent for the dig­i­tal plat­forms has to be updated quickly and some­times real time, has to give the unique expe­ri­ence of a beat­i­ful inter­face that printed mag­a­zines gen­er­ally have.