Wired magazine purchase/view database
Does anyone subscribe to Wired or National Geographic (amongst others) digital magazines and wondered how they were created?
Adobe has opened the doors for anyone to now develop similar digital magazines for purchase. The final deliverable is posted to the app store for consideration following the same process path as any app takes.
There is one small catch. An Enterprise or Professional Edition package must be subscribed to if your intention is to create digital magazines for purchase. The pricing for each package consists of a platform and service fee. Changes have recently been made to the pricing structure following numerous complaints over the bloated price.
The Professional Edition is currently $495 (around £312) per month, with the Enterprise Edition from $3,995 (around £2,525) a month. With this you receive Gold Technical Support (specific to the Digital Publishing Suite) and up to 5,000 issue downloads. After the first year these downloads will not be free.
There is also annual pricing for download rates.
- For up to 25,000 issues $5,500 (3,500)
- For up to 250,000 issues $37,500 (£24,000)
- For up to 500,000 issues $60,000 (£45,000)
- For up to 1,000,000 issues $80,000 (£52,700)
- For up to 5,000,000 issues $300,000 (£176,000)
For issue downloads above 500,000 you will require the Enterprise Edition.
Wired magazine content browser
Clearly the pricing is targeting the publishing houses who are charging for their magazines and doesn't cater for internal teams or independent publishers who only dream of selling the quantities quoted in the pricing.
The other catch is that you will need to be running InDesign CS5 or higher to take advantage of the Digital Publishing Suite. Again, for many, another expense to be added to the list.
So the decision lies in solving the equation to: gross profit - (software cost (if not already running CS5+) + production cost + chosen edition cost + chosen download tariff cost + employee salaries) = net profit.
The determining factor will be bottom line profit, but is this purely opening up the market to the big boys and ignoring the little ones? As a keen reader of all types of literature I was really looking forward to purchasing digital magazines covering a wide range of subjects and styles. It appears that this will not be possible, looking at current costings, but is this also a way of keeping the quality of content to a maximum rather than letting everyone 'have a go'? I guess we'll just have to wait and see.