Print is dead. Physical sales of magazines and newspapers continue their slow decline, but that does not mean that magazines need to give up the beauty of magazine design.
Most of us do the majority of our reading online, using a combination of websites, smartphones apps, tablet apps and Kindles. Part of this is because the news we want to read is available online either for free or much cheaper than we could acquire it in physical form, but also because of its immediacy.
You have a smartphone in your pocket the whole time, so you always have access to new content when waiting in a queue or sitting on the bus. There is no time to be bored, but also no need to remember to carry that bulky magazine with you during your three tube changes on the way to work.
The open source content management system WordPress has made publishing content on a good-looking website easier than ever, but scrolling down a page to continue reading a long article just isn’t the same as turning the page. Turning the page of a magazine gave your brain a second to digest the page you had just read and prepare itself for more information.
Luckily, there are some services that let you recreate the feeling of turning a physical page while reading the content on a phone or tablet with digital flipbooks. Isuu and Yumpu are the most well known options, and are pretty simple to set up if you have already created your content in PDF form.
Using these platforms, you no longer need to worry about how your page will look on different screen sizes, as the magazine page size is set and stable. This means that you can make beautiful article title pages that excite people into reading – another thing lost when reading online.
Despite holding much of the visual appeal of traditional magazines, digital flipbooks can also include multimedia elements like videos and audio streams, meaning that you can get the best of both worlds. And best of all, as found out by flipbook resource http://nubuntu.org, some of these options are free!
Photograph courtesy of Yumpu