WHILE publishers wrestle to get their heads around mobile delivery, one new-fangled format they are finally embracing is the replica digital edition.
Unlike websites, digital editions imitate the experience of reading a newspaper or magazine as faithfully as possible. Titles retain their print layout and design and readers can electronically turn the pages, which feature video pictures and hyperlinks leading to richer content.
Richard Lindley’s Realview Technologies has been executing digital editions in Australia for seven years and has about 1200 local clients, plus 300 or so internationally. “It has taken a while but it’s (now) a massive growth market for us,” Lindley says.
“But publishers still struggle with the business model: how do you make revenue out of it?”
The Audit Bureau of Circulations started quarterly audits of subscriber numbers for replica digital editions last year.
In 2008, Realview scored a coup when it won the contract to provide the digital edition of US weekly The New Yorker..
Its clients in Australia include News Limited’s Cumberland Courier Newspapers, which has digital editions of all its 23 NSW community papers, which include The Manly Daily and The Wentworth Courier. (News also publishes The Australian.)
Digital editions get the paper in front of the eyes of traditionally hard-to-access readers such as apartment dwellers, says Cumberland Courier general manager John Webster.
“We believe there’s also a growing pool of people who will be quite happy just to look at the paper online because they conduct so much of their lives online already,” he says.
