Abandoning Print – digital editions

Over the last few years, a certain publication trend that has been gaining momentum. And now it’s on the verge of changing from a being cool trend to the way ‘it’s done’.

I’m talking about magazines going online. Not just online with a web site to entice you to buy the printed edition, but soup-to-nuts 100% of the content online, without ever creating paper version. Ink and paper replaced by HTML and PDFs.

As we all know, the Web is getting faster, prettier to look at and easier to use, whether you are an information consumer or producer. Though all that is great, there are two other big factors that are in position to put this trend over the top into common practice. Or depending on point of view it’s already over the top and these factors will just cement this practice in place for the foreseeable term.

The two big factors I see driving this are the ‘Going Green’ movement, and the real 800-pound gorilla – money.

It’s simple economics really. If you print 100,000 issues in a run, you’ve spent tens of thousands on your printing alone. Let’s not forget shipping, storage and all the other little fees that add up really quickly. In any economy, expenditures of tens of thousands of dollars per issue are serious business. But as we all know, the economy is suffering and people are looking to save in any way they can. It’s pretty easy for the budget hawks to home in on several hundred thousand dollars of printing costs in a year and to look for less costly ways to get the information out.

Though not as pressing as the accountant saying you must cut X from your printing budget, there is a very real pressure towards greening in the print world. Recycled paper and ‘green’ inks help to reduce the environmental impact of printing. But really, nothing could have less impact than not every actually printing something.

The confluence of these social, economic and technological changes have unearthed lots of organizations looking to do away with their printed materials. I’m not some doomsayer proclaiming ‘Print is dead!’ and the magazine section of the store will be deserted, not at all. But I am saying there’s a new sheriff in town, and a new way of thinking taking hold.

Of course, dispensing with a printed edition is a pretty radical decision and not without its own pitfalls. Many people are looking towards a hybridized approach. MAKE magazine offered their subscribers the choice of receiving a hard copy or digital version of each issue. At that time, 10% of their subscriber base opted out of hard copies, which obviously represents a significant and immediate reduction in production costs with no loss of subscriber revenue.

So what’s best? Kill your printing altogether? Offer up both? Which solution is better? Of course there is no blanket answer for that. For each instance there’s some many variables that it needs to be taken case by case. But it is certain is that the number of magazines using digital editions to augment their print versions, or doing away with printed editions, will increase over time.

‘So how does one make the digital conversion?’ you ask. There are a few ways that have various strengths and weaknesses. We’ll start to investigate them in my next article.