Digital Archiving
Magazine publishers with years of back issues have new opportunities to monetize their assets. Paywalls and digital archives are a powerful way to engage new customers and reconnect your premium content with readers that love your magazines.
Value of Print
In a recent article for the Evening Standard, Clara Strunck writes about the London’s largest print archive, Hymag, which incidentally ended up winning a Guinness World Record. As Strunck mentions, the more magazines that were being made lead to more being destroyed, but then as more are destroyed (or less printed as publishers go digital for more issues), the more valuable these physical copies become.
However, while the physical copies gain more interest, even from younger generations, that does not mean digital should not have a presence too, even with these older, archived issues. This is easily exhibited in Hymag’s decision to seek digitization of their entire archive, but with no plans to stop or close their physical archives. This new project of theirs shows where the future is truly heading for magazines and publishing as a whole: it is not a war of print versus digital, but rather a marriage of the two experiences.
A Happy Medium
Print offers a unique experience, but so does digital. They each have their strengths and more and more readers are opting for both experiences. With projects like Hymag’s digitization of their archives, readers can choose what they want their experience to be issue to issue, publication to publication. Maybe one day they look up the digital Vogue issue from the month and year they were born, and the next week they receive their physical copy of that month’s Vogue to read at their kitchen table.
eMagazines offers a similar solution for publishers who are looking to create an archive for their readers to explore and have at the tip of their fingers. For example, eMagazines digitizes and currently houses 800+ issues of Baseball Digest for readers to peruse at their leisure.
eMagazines also offers the perfect solution for publishing’s marriage of digital and print experiments—readers can access their latest issues right from their phone, tablet, or desktop, without needing to download an app or even log in. With this and their archive offer, publishers can give their readers access to more of what they love.
Learn more about eMagazines’ amazing services on our website at www.emagazines.com.
Baseball Digest Archive Collection. (2019). Retrieved November 22, 2019, from https://baseballdigestarchives.com/
Strunck, C. (2019, September 12). Inside London’s biggest magazine archive. Retrieved from https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/esmagazine/inside-londons-biggest-magazine-archives-a4232441.html
