With all the doom and gloom of the US economy, we did a little study here, examining average page counts of all Nxtbooks in the past 90 days. While this evidence is far from the last word, perhaps things aren’t so bad.

In May the average Nxtbook had a 51 pages. This dipped down to just over 50 pages in July. However, July’s looking great, with an average page count per book of 55.47 pages. Hopefully this is a sign of good things to come for magazine publishers.

Several months back, we wrote about Issuu, a free DIY service for digital magazines, which works fine, so long as you’re into donating your content to others:

By distributing or disseminating Uploader Submissions through the Issuu
Service, you hereby grant to Issuu a worldwide, non-exclusive,
transferable, assignable, fully paid-up, royalty-free, license to host,
transfer, display, perform, reproduce, distribute, and otherwise
exploit your Uploader Submissions, in any media forms or formats, and
through any media channels, now known or hereafter devised, including
without limitation, RSS feeds, embeddable functionality, and
syndication arrangements in order to distribute, promote or advertise
your Uploader Submissions through the Issuu Service.

Whenever you’re talking "free" and "DIY," that’s a nice recipe for getting a lot of submissions that the users don’t have permission for and for a while Issuu seemed to be the Net’s largest repository for liberated content… until now.

Mygazines is a company like Issuu that’s been released in beta format. Like Issuu, it’s free and like Issuu, it’s a DIY product. Like Issuu, there seems to be lot of content that the publishers never dreamed would end up there. And like Issuu, they seem to have little regard for people trying to make money with content:

Mygazines may remove any Content and Mygazines accounts at any time for
any reason (including, but not limited to, upon receipt of claims or
allegations from third parties or authorities relating to such
Content), or for no reason at all.

Of course, I could be overeacting. After all, anyone concerned about their content could always contact "John Smith," the name of the person who registered the URL (accordinging to WhoIs). Better yet, go visit the company, which claims to be located in Anguilla.

MinOnline is featuring the top The Top 5 Women’s Mag Website Picks. Nxtbook’s digital magazine of NYLON was named #2! Very cool!

Scroll around to find "rubber ducky round" and see developer Jason’s cubicle, featured on CNN.

Media Business has a good write-up on our new Nxtstand, offering key differences between the Nxtbook strategy and other strategies.

The guys that watch the tracking information whispered into my ear about a certain client. I won’t give out their name here, but I am going to share the data, because it’s a classic definition of what an engaged audience fed by viral activity looks like.

First up, the magazine was e-mailed out to the subscriber list. This tried and true method yielded nearly 3,800 reads. But from there, things got crazy… Links posted to MySpace, blogs and internet forums netted the magazine an additional 18,900 reads, for a total of 22,642.

How engaged was the audience? The average reader read nearly 60 pages of the publication and stayed inside for nearly 15 minutes (Keep in mind - this is the AVERAGE - and includes everyone who left after seeing one page.)

Looking to monetize the publication? Check this out: 28% of readers clicked on at least one ad. Here’s the real head-turner. One ad in the magazine was clicked on by 170 readers. On, and by the way, the ad appears on page 25 of the publication!

What’s your click-through rate?

The NY Times features Readius, the first roll-up e-paper display due to hit the market next year. At $359, we’re still nowhere near a price that the average consumer will pick one up and at five inches diagonal with black and white text, we’re still nowhere near the size or resolution it will need to be if magazine publishers are to embrace it, but no matter…. it’s the type of product that could birth the magazine of the next generation.

NOTE: Excerpt from the 2008 Gilbane Report

Bentley Systems
Helping to improve the world’s infrastructure Bentley Systems (www.bentley.com) provides software for the lifecycle of the world’s infrastructure. The company’s comprehensive portfolio for the building, plant, civil, and geospatial verticals spans architecture, engineering, construction (AEC), and operations. With revenues now surpassing $400 million annually, and more than 2,000 colleagues around the world, Bentley is the leading provider of AEC software to the Engineering News-Record Top 500 Design Firms and major owner-operators and was named the world’s No. 2 provider of GIS/geospatial software solutions in a recent Daratech research study.

BE Magazine is a quarterly corporate magazine produced by Bentley Systems. It is a horizontal publication that targets small to large architectural, engineering, and construction firms and owner/operators in four main sectors: building, civil, geospatial, and plant. The theme of the publication is “improving the world’s infrastructure” with a sub-theme of “collaborating across the distributed enterprise”. BE Magazine is available to subscribers only in a digital format and is sent via HTML email to 200,000+ of their customers and prospects. They typically print 20,000 copies for distribution at trade shows, seminars, and Bentley-sponsored events. Carol Minton is the Editor in Chief of BE Magazine. It has been her vision to develop a completely digital corporate magazine to serve the Bentley Systems community.

The Challenge
BE Magazine’s goal is to engage an extremely large number of BE users in a format that combines text, images, HTML, animation, audio, and video in a single media-rich environment while featuring a value-add for advertisers by providing individual ad-specific metrics that are superior to general circulation numbers, bingo card responses, and pass-along readership estimates.

Meeting the Challenge
Carol Minton has been working to build the BE (Bentley Empowered) brand by establishing a positive connection with Bentley users, resulting in stronger relationships with users and prospective users. To help her reach her goals, she chose Nxtbook because of its technological flexibility. Their browser-based delivery mechanism does not require a download; interactive links take readers directly to more pertinent content; and the capability to print part or all of each publication is very convenient for readers. Nxtbook provides valuable connect time data and statistics, including page views, time spent on page, hits, click-throughs, etc., which BE then forwards to advertisers.

Results

• Open rates of the magazine’s HTML email blasts usually average close to 50%, which is extremely high for email distribution.

• Digital “shelf life” has translated into higher readership numbers over time as past issues are electronically archived on BE.org.

• No resources on Bentley systems are required to archive BE Magazines since they reside on Nxtbook servers. They have every issue live in the archives.

Lessons Learned

• The challenge is to find the right balance between providing the interactivity to attract readers to BE and keeping them as long as possible, while also providing interactive content and links that direct them elsewhere. They don’t want readers to leave Nxtbook too soon, risking that they will not return. Carol makes a special effort to include video, sidebars with links, etc., whenever possible.

• They keep all editorial content on the short side so that BE is a relatively quick read that stimulates readers to explore topics further.

• Digital editions offer a timeliness advantage that allows the editorial team to update materials right up to — and even after — the mass email blast has been released to the users.

Gilbane Group Conclusions

• It is the interactivity and linking that helps generate the excellent open rates and strong average session data. The willingness to allow readers to venture beyond the primary publication to further explore their interests makes it more likely that the reader will return to the primary publication’s Web site regularly.

• It is very important that the Digital Magazine be well integrated into the rest of the digital strategy. In this case, they do newsletters and printed editions for trade shows, and are planning to add community features such as wikis, blogs, and forums.

• BE is an excellent model for others wishing to develop online corporate publications.

In return for your contact info, the folks at Lyris HQ are offering Email Subject Line: 15 Rules to Make them Right. Sounds like a winner to us.

One Freakonomic looks at Maghound:

I don’t sense that magazine readers are dying to swap subscriptions
very often. Part of the appeal of receiving a magazine is knowing your
way around its format, its style, its idioms. Of course I may be
totally wrong about that; I order new magazine subscriptions all the
time and inevitably hate them after four issues. Also, the model
doesn’t suffer if people don’t swap: they pay the same regardless, and it’s less work for Maghound if they don’t swap.