Digital magazineshave been around since the dawn of 'digital' itself, and have passed through a range of stages since that point, from floppy discs to Flash (RIP).
Today, there are five main methods for creating adigital magazine. The model you choose will depend yourreadership, budget,marketing strategy, and business model.
An embeddedPDF magazine
We've all experienced clicking through to anonline magazineand seeing — with a sigh — that it has been published as an embedded PDF.
There are a range of services that allow PDFs to be embedded in a website, and organisations in a rush to create a 'digital' version of their magazine often use this method first.
The result is often aflip-book style copy of aprint magazine,or a link to aPDF file.
Unfortunately, embedded PDFs — andPDF filesin general — make for a terrible digitaluser experience. They're especially poor onmobile devices. They don't give reliable analytics; they're also not usually accessible; they aren't great with SEO; and they generally won't perform as well as the alternatives.
Conclusion:We know content teams sometimes love PDFs, but they simply aren't suitable for modern digital audiences. We've published more about their limitations in our article on the decline of the PDF.
Anappleorandroidapp
The next option for creating adigital magazineis to build amagazineapp. The great thing about apps is that they make for a great experience on mobile, includingiphones,ipads, andandroiddevices. They also have built in distribution though theApp Storeand theGoogle Play Store.
However, the cost of building a bespoke app is prohibitive for most content teams, and the generic apptemplates— which are cheaper — won't always meet your needs. If you are interested in building an app, you also need to be sure that you can have a rock-solid strategy for getting that app in front of your readers.
Conclusion: Apps can look amazing, but they are very expensive to create and maintain. It can also be difficult to get your app to stand out from the crowd.
AKindlee-magazine
With the rise ofAmazon'sKindle, many traditional publishers opted to distributed electronic versions of their magazines using theKindlenews stand. These magazines are very easy to read onKindledevices, and make for a great reading for those tired of reading on brightly-lit screens.
Unfortunately,Kindlee-magazinesare extremely limited in their functionality. You won't be able to include many images, and many readers won't experience them in colour.
Conclusion:This is a good model for established magazines that publish very 'writerly' content. But the visual experience is poor, and the audience is generally limited toKindlepower users.
A collection of posts published to a CMS
For those wishing to simply get their magazine content online, a simple option is to use your existing CMS and publish each post to a unique URL path. With a landing page representing that magazine's 'table of contents' and cover, readers can navigate your magazine in the same way as they would any other content on the web.
Your magazine, though, is typically different than short-form content published to your blog. Generally speaking, magazine articles have more attention — and resources — paid to their production. This results in higherqualitycontent, which is intended to have a greater impact than ordinary blog or news articles.
For this reason, many content teams are reluctant to publish this content using the vanilla visual presentation of their CMS.
Conclusion: This is a good option for content teams looking to simply get their content on the web as quickly as possible, though it is unlikely to match the impact of more visually impressive and immersive content.
Adigital publicationof visually immersive digital stories
The final option is to create adigital publicationof visually immersive stories. These stories typically have a distraction-free visual presentation, with high-resolution media. They also often use advancedvisual storytelling techniques, such as scroll-based animation.
