My bosses are seriously considering transforming our niche trade magazine from print to digital via Texterity and other similar services. Forget how this could or could not affect advertising. My focus right now is the reader. I would love to hear everyone's opinion for and/or against going to the digital format. I have not been in my position very long but aside from saving the cost on printing and postage, I do not see many advantages.

The greatest concerns for me in regards to making this jump are accessibility and time. Our readers are constantly on the move. The portability of print allows them to read us anywhere and at their leisure. Will someone who is supposed to be keeping a watchful eye on the business going to spend 30 minutes of his or her time reading something online (I'm sure they're more likely to be playing Sudoku online than reading a trade journal)? Or spend their lunch hour clicking on the computer instead of disconnecting for a bit to get some food? For me the web has always been about speed and convenience, getting what you want then getting on with your life. I've read that stories that run multiple pages can turn some people off (and it does for me unless I'm really, really, really into the subject matter). This seems contrary to a magazine where stories can run at least two pages. Will the reader go home, fire up the old computer and read the magazine at the expense of spending time with family, not to mention wanting to 'clock out' once he or she gets home?

But the biggest problem, in my mind, is how our readers (whose time is very valuable) would go about accessing our magazine. If it's on a laptop they will require access, possibly WiFi or a hard connection which they most likely will have to pay for ON TOP of the cost of their sub. Will it be on a web-enabled PDA? I don't know who would want to read pages of text on a 3-5 inch screen. Plus this could pretty much tick off advertisers.

My proposal to them is to do a mix of both, where the web supplements/complements the magazine. Short, quick news stories that are timely and could even lead to greater coverage in the magazine. This isn't a groundbreaking solution by any means but by far the simplest. I would love to hear your thoughts.

We tried texterity for 1.5 years. the original motivation was to switch international subscribers to digital-only to save $$. In the end, the overwhelming response from readers was that they wanted the hard copy to read and refer back to. Only about a dozen readers signed up for it, so it wasn't cost effective for our pub and we stopped recently.
On the editorial side, it was a huge help to have this as an online edition. The current solution pales in comparison to having the real magazine with ads online.
I tried accessing the texterity version many times on a PDA, and it took so long to load I got frustrated and gave up. I can imagine readers would do the same--and give it less time.
If I were you I would push for a combination and the merits of having both, if your pub can stomach the cost.

Ramon, I think your instincts are good about this digital mag stuff. You obviously need to reserach your readers before undertaking such a thing. How do they want to read your magazine?

Moreover, editors rarely use the technolgy to the benefit of editorial by adding additional content for their readers in the way of audio or video, editorial to special stuff. And if you were to do that, it would have features something like a web site, then why bother. Other than to sve postage on international distribution and have direct links for advertisers, I'm not sure how valuable such a product has been.

One major problem with digital editions is how the copy has to be read. Most of the ones I've seen force the reader to scroll down to read one column, scroll back up to read the second column, etc. Others require that a software program be downloaded. Don't know about you, but my company frowns on such downloads, as many companies do. Frankly, I don't see much reason to do a digital edition if you are posting your current issue's content online. All of our issues are packaged individually online and are searchable as a group. And links to advertisers are included with every online article and product announcement.