What's the best Digital Magazine Software to use in-house?

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Permalink Reply by jody on August 13, 2009 at 3:26pm

I've already found these links but was wondering if anyone here has had any good or bad experiences with these softwares that are specifically for converting your PDFs to Digital Editions:

Digital Magazine Software

Desktop Author:
http://www.desktopauthor.com/default.asp

Dotminded:
http://www.dotpapers.com/home/

3D Issue:
http://www.3dissue.com/

eMag Creator:
http://www.emagcreator.com

LCM Digital Media:
http://www.lcmdigitalmedia.com

Paperator:
http://www.paperator.com

Page Gangster:
http://www.pagegangster.com/

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Permalink Reply by Pierre Bisaillon on August 18, 2009 at 5:12pm

Jody,

I can make two suggestions:

1 - Our own Mygazines reader, in addition to most everything found in others (rich media, social bookmarking, fast loading), has unique features you simply won't find anywhere else.
"Clippings" allows readers to clip,print or email coupons in high resolution with perfectly readable bar codes. The same can be applied to recipes, lists, products, business cards, etc.
Self-service customized Widgets that allow you to display anything you can possibly create with HTML, Javascript or feeds.
Article breakdowns which enables reader to amass compilations.
The Mygazines.net Newsstand is also included with all our reader licenses driving traffic and subscribers directly to the publisher at no additional cost (and no revenue share!) for our clients and the clients of most other providers.
Pricing is an all-inclusive model between $100 to $500 based on number of licenses.

2 - Here's a comprehensive list of eproviders that you can scan and judge for yourself.
http://blog.mygazines.com/?p=3

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Permalink Reply by Joakim Ditlev on August 13, 2009 at 3:29pm

Jody,
You probably want to look into Zmags as well. Has probably the most options when you want to configure your digital edition and add rich media. http://www.zmags.com

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Permalink Reply by Alex Mas. on August 14, 2009 at 8:06am

We use http://www.paperator.com
It works okay and cheap.

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Permalink Reply by Lawrence Kluger on August 18, 2009 at 4:55pm

I would encourage you to try pageturnpro.com. Really cool self-serve product at better prices than most of the others.

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Permalink Reply by Cimarron Buser on August 18, 2009 at 5:10pm

Jody - I realize that you asked for "software", but web-based service models out there can be quite reasonable as well. Not to guess your motivations, but many folks start with "do it yourself" software as an economic issue, and then realize that the initial purchase cost, plus the time and energy to do prep in-house is more than they bargained for. I'd encourage you to ask some of the full service providers such as Texterity, NXTBook, and others to do a free demo issue for you. Then, you can compare the quality, features, and "fully loaded cost" of DIY (inhouse) versus a service partner.

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Permalink Reply by Dave Brown on August 18, 2009 at 11:58pm

Few know this company, but publishers --- for approx. $200 per YEAR, you can publish as often and as many pages as you like per issue. Plus, you can drop-in unlimited videos. It's fast, vector-based....great. The only downside, is for this rate you don't get branding of the loading page, but well-worth it regardless. www.yudu.com Enjoy! Dave, in Ottawa, Canada.

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Permalink Reply by Jimmy Dean on August 20, 2009 at 8:31pm

Jody...don't know your needs, however MAGAZINE MANAGER is one u shld defntly look at. I've been using 4 years, and they've just rolled out V.2 and it's pretty awesone. i don't work 4 them...just a happy customer. It's an ASP...after initial set up (not much, just dataloading) it's a monthly fee + $40 per user...small mag would spend about $300/mo...to run your entire business.

yell f i cn help...

jd

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Permalink Reply by Peter Worthington on October 10, 2009 at 11:08am

As we wanted to manage everything in-house we ended up purchasing 3D Issue as it was off the shelf software and the only one that had a Mac compatible version. We went with the Lite version as we didnt need all the bells and whistles. For a 'lite version' it was expensive but we are pretty happy with it.

The biting point for us was the way they have set up their flash magazine componenet to communicates with your Google Analytics account and records all the actions of your reader so we can monitor the success of our digital editions without having to worry about database management.

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