After nearly 30 years of opportunity to slowly move into the digital age magazines and newspapers have began a mad rush to transform themselves into electronic clones of themselves.

The problem with that is just providing a copy of your magazine or newspaper in digital format is ignoring the way a digital reader reads copy. Completely disregarding how images translate to the WWW.

I am all for digital versions of EVERY publication out there. So here are my observations as a person who has actively (sometimes over actively) been reading online for almost 20 years now.

1. Have subscriptions based on topics and categories not complete publications. This way you can have more content delivered to an audience who is actually asking for this area of interest. Target audience has never been easier to get.
2. ALL digital formats should be notable on various platforms. I am not sure what technology converts between platforms best, but in a print publication I can put a sticky not on a page or dog ear a magazine article or even cut out a newspaper column. So I expect to do the equivalent in digital.
3. Subscriptions are fine if you have the user login. This is a countable subscriber number. Not only that but you can even track when and for how long someone reads each part of your website. FaceBook has an interesting feature that I feel strangely drawn to. They let you rate the ads that you view.
4. Don’t fire your entire staff. Send the home to telecommute. If the magazine is digital then save rent and maintenance charges for your real estate.  Actually I want to read MORE content. So if I can subscriber to ONLY the content that I want, maybe that will only be 2 or 3 topics, then you have to give me enough to read.
5. KISS – One column width please. If I read it on my ebook how do you think 2 or 3 columns translates to a 7 inch screen?
6. Font size should translate well to ebook also.

Now I mentioned ebooks already a few times. My point being is that now with WiFi content beaming directly into portable devices such as iPhones, Blackberrys, Kindles and Other ebook devices such as the Sony eBook (using eink, my favorite) There is no reason to limit your reader to sitting in front of a stationary screen.

Years ago we were almost happy with the thought of carrying our documents on our portable laptops. Yeah right. How inconvenient was that. Nice thought though. A laptop is more like a portable office than a portable piece of reading material.

Then someone thought of that and came out with the first gen of ebooks. OK I can’t stand the glare on a first generation ebook. Same with reading on a PDA.

But now with the NO glare eink versions of portable reading devices this all has changed. I actually see no difference between my Sony ebook and a paperback or hardcopy of anything I read: with the exception of color, I get it all just fine if it formats correctly.

Honestly I would carry that thing ALL OVER and have my nose permanently stuck in a book if there were enough out there that were formatted to be easily read on it.

Using ebooks I can carry my entire school reading list in my purse. WOW! Ya know…

Using ebooks I am instantly greener as I am not reading off of paper.

The cost of publishing a file is far less expensive then layout, printing and delivering paper.

I honestly can’t see why newspapers, magazine and book publishers did not jump like frogs when the eink books came out. I think that earlier than eink would have been a disappointment as it was not a comfortable experience for the reader. But now.

I have subscribed to many blogs that I get through feeds (and don’t put excerpts for your feeds, see notes later about this) and I get about 10 articles at a time and copy the entire feed and paste it into Word and then make the font larger then save as HTML and copy these files to my ebook. Yep all that. I would love for the publishers of my favorite magazines and newspapers to have a friendlier format.

What are the specs for this format?

OK.

My perfect portable style would be:

• RESIZEABLE TYPE STARTING AT 8 GOING TO 12 THEN 16 ( my ebook lets me choose S M L sizes but they have to be available in the file)
• Single column
• All images at least 300 width on their own line or page
• Any type of chart should be viewable on a page the size of a mass market paperback. If it can’t be seen that small leave it out. Give me a link I can download it on my regular computer at my convenience.
• List all links (divided by type) to files and websites at the end of each article or book so that I can check them out later if I want to.
• Don’t abbreviate the feed content or the ebook content in an attempt to get me to go read something on your website. The point of reading on a portable device is ‘I WANT TO READ IT WHERE I AM’ not stuck in come chair staring at some screen. 
• Don’t be afraid of putting ads in econtent I would say 2 per article or 10 per entire ebook might be annoying but I can just hit the NEXT PAGE button and pass them by just like on a TV or Radio commercial I can switch the channel. Isn’t this how you make money? Selling advertising? Why would this be any different for electronic content?

So don’t go away just go ahead and go digital. All these magazines and newspapers whining about loss of business, that seems to me to be their own fault. We readers are still out there as our enormous presence as blog readers has proved. So if you have lost business it is because you refused to adapt and decided instead of change to opt for deconstruction.

Sony E-readers (with e-ink)

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