Digital Publishing Company

We charge an all-inclusive per page fee to create and host the digital edition. This fee is determined by the following.

• The number of pages in the publication.
• The frequency with which the publication is produced.
• The overall volume of pages a publisher provides in a year.
• The complexity of the publication.

How do you work this out? When we give a quote we are trying to estimate how much time we think creating your digital edition will cost us. Human production time is our biggest fixed cost—the more we can reduce it the lower the price can be.

We like to be transparent with our customers so here’s how it works.

The number of pages in the publication
A lot of the steps that we go through in production are the same whether it is a 200-page publication or a 20-page publication. You have to get the files, import them into the software, combine pages, run segmentation, output the edition, index and register it. A lot of these steps are machine time. So it’s a lot more efficient for us to run these processes once over 200 pages that it would be to produce ten 20-page magazines. The bigger your publication the better deal we can give you.

The frequency with which the publication is produced
If you have a publication that is weekly, we will see it at least 50 times a year; if it’s monthly 12, and so on. For regular publications we can write a profile—this means the software will recognise certain common elements next time it sees an issue and this helps speed up production. The more frequently we see a publication the more efficient production can be.

The overall volume of pages a publisher provides in a year
Big buyers can negotiate bulk deals in any business, but this has a little bit more logic where we are concerned. Big publishers are usually more organised: we have a production schedule; we know what we are getting and when; we see the same publications coming round and round; the publishers know exactly what they need to send us; we invoice and get paid regularly. Life is easier and for that we can reduce costs.

The complexity of the publication
A complex publication to us is one with no logical structure. Imagine a typical ‘TV magazine‘ that is a seemingly random mixture of chat, pictures, pull-out quotes, the design is very creative and no two pages look alike. Compare this to The Financial Times, say, which is nicely paid out in a grid. We can pretty much teach the software to handle most pages of the FT by itself. But a human being is probably going to have to do each page of the TV magazine by hand. It can make the difference of a couple of hours to a couple of days to production time.

For large volumes and regular publications we can also produce in India which cuts costs significantly.