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August 4, 2005

Digital Editions Going Strong

Digital editions of newspapers are doing surprisingly well. The latest numbers show that 327 of America's 1,422 newspapers now produce digital replica editions and their sales account for 1.75 percent of their circulation, according to the U.S. Audit Bureau of Circulation. And some specialist papers have found a new lease of life from their digital editions, reports The Press Gazette, a British weekly that covers the media industry. For example, the digital edition of America's Investor's Business Daily has 47,000 subscribers, a fifth of its total sales, two years after launching. In the UK, meanwhile, The Press-Gazette says the greatest success is The Scotsmanm, which digitized its entire archive, which goes back to 1817, last year. The archive is a digital facsimile of the editions, allowing readers to view an edition page by page or call up stories and read them as they appeared. The entire archive can also be searched by keywords or names. So far, 30 per cent of the archive's users are private individuals looking up family history, and the other 70 percent are from academic institutions or businesses. Cyberjournalist.com http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/article/280705/taking_the_paper

Posted by P. Kaufman at August 4, 2005 9:26 AM