When it comes to magazines, print, essentially, is having its pockets picked. You see, as magazine printers walk down the dark alley of UK-wide economic uncertainty, preoccupied with depleting paginations and falling client numbers, Apple has snuck up behind them and is helping companies lift publishers right out of the printer's back pocket with a platform no one, initially, saw the point in: the tablet computer.

Digital edition magazines can attract as many as 400,000 downloads these days (be that for digital-only publications), thanks almost exclusively to the success of tablet computers, and so printers are being forced, finally, to take notice. While print will remain part of the magazine future, the portion of work printers are fighting over is depleting and the publishers are shifting increasingly to a multimedia strategy.

A production solution that includes conversions for digital editions is what the client now wants, but the problem for printers is that, while they realise the need to meet that requirement to avoid being overlooked for contracts in favour of those offering a one-stop shop, providing that digital edition service is more complicated than many could ever imagine.

Immersive medium

What printers, and indeed publishers, did not fully comprehend when the tablet computer first emerged was that the platform offers a way of reading magazines that is as close to the print experience as any digital device has ever got: you can touch it, turn the pages and interact with it. Indeed, you can interact on a more immersive level than print, because of video, audio and animation. And readers are increasingly realising this. In the February 2012 ABC figures, of the print magazines going digital, Men’s Health led the way, reporting 7,779 paid-for downloads in the six months to December 2011, and in the same period T3 got 7,327 downloads, GQ 5,731 downloads and Cosmopolitan 5,675 downloads (these were the top four magazines in terms of digital sales).

These numbers obviously pale into insignificance when compared with current print runs – Men’s Health, for example, has a print circulation of 221,176 – but very gradually the two are approaching each other. Print circulations are consistently reducing each time the ABCs are published – Men’s Health’s print circulation was down 10.1% last time out – while the growth of digital editions is nothing short of phenomenal – the latest figures for Men’s Health digital sales represent a 345.5% year-on-year increase.

Hence, digital editions are increasingly something publishers cannot ignore, and so printers increasingly cannot ignore them either if they want to keep contracts. Thankfully, they are beginning to realise this.

"We are very keen to offer our clients the complete solution – and nowadays, that obviously has to include the re-purposing of files for multichannel publishing," reveals Kirk Galloway, managing director at Buxton Press.

Doug Gray, managing director of Cambrian Printers, puts it more bluntly: "The likelihood is that if we don’t do it, we will lose out as other printers or other organisations will come in with the digital solution as the added-value sell and we will have missed the opportunity."

The good news for printers, according to Sam Lewis, co-founder and director at digital magazine software provider Aptus Interactive, is that printers are in the prime spot to capitalise on the digital bonanza.

"Printers need to understand that they are in a really strong position," he explains. "They are having all the right conversations with the right people already – so in getting into this area they are ahead of many of the other businesses out there."

By "other businesses" Lewis means the hundreds of companies offering digital magazine services already. Gray says that competition is also starting to come from other links in the supply chain. He reveals that the distributors he spoke to at Publishing Expo were all talking about becoming a one-stop provider for publishers, including for print and digital.

But having the motivation and the opportunity is not the same as having the capability. And there is some debate about how best to acquire that capability. The three options are: build your own system, buy in the expertise or do a mixture of the two.

Buying in the capability from a third party seems, on the face of it, to be the cheapest, easiest and most sensible solution. Aptus Interactive provides a service costing around ￡249 per year per magazine, and then around ￡199 per issue on top for straight PDF upload or around ￡350 on top per issue for a full ‘bells and whistles’ edition incorporating video, audio and animations. All the printer needs are the assets and Aptus handles everything else. This approach appeals to Gray.

"I think the strategic partner route will be the most sensible, because if we start trying to develop our own it could be two years before we are ready and by that time, we will have missed the boat," says Gray.

Lewis unsurprisingly agrees. His company works with publishing houses such as River Group and Media Circus Group, as well as providing the tech behind Rio Ferdinand’s digital-only #5 magazine, which has had 495,989 downloads – the latter showing the potential sales digital editions could demand. The company is currently looking to link with printers to enable expansion – such is the power it believes printers have in this area. And Lewis says there is a lot in it for printers too.

"Printers will seriously struggle to afford the extensive development costs to create a competitive solution, but even if they did, by the time they could release it the market would have moved on and the opportunities would have been missed," he says. "The best solution for them as a result is to work with a company with whom they can partner to provide a white-labelled solution."

Broader compatibility

He adds that it is not all about the iPad either, as a technology solution that produces magazines that work with the plethora of other tablet and smart phone platforms, such as Android, is also crucial, something he says, Aptus’s system is capable of but that even some specialist competitors have not managed as yet.

One software company already in place at magazine printers – including Headley Brothers, Stephens and George and Polestar – is YuDu. Les Csonge, co-founder and director, reiterates that going it alone is not the safest of plans no matter how tempting it might seem.

"I think most of our partners, especially our bigger clients, have on their list the aim of building their own system," he reveals. "It is only when they see how complex these systems can be, that they realise it’s not the most sensible option. Some have tried and come straight back to us. "

Csonge puts the value of the YuDu software investment at ￡2m – a sum out of reach of many printers. Even those printers that could spend that sum don’t, says Csonge. He cites the example of Quad Graphics in the US, whom he says is the biggest independent print group in the world. It uses YuDu as Csonge says it realised it needed a company dedicated to that side of the business because the digital world changes so rapidly.

Despite the challenges, one company currently using YuDu is investigating a self-built solution to run alongside it – South Wales printer Pensord. Managing director Darren Coxon explains that Pensord has been providing digital editions to clients since 2008 using the software, but feels it needs an additional, more comprehensive, service – although the cost of implementing such a system was not disclosed.

"What we can do is harness the best aspects of the technology available and using our own experience we can utilise that technology in the best way for publishers as that is where our skill set really comes into its own – we understand publishers," he explains. "We aim to provide a template-driven workflow so that the publishers can put the same content into different templates and the system will handle those requests to create the best reading experience for whichever output device it is being delivered to."

Walstead Investments-owned Rhapsody – formerly Wyndeham Pre-Press – claims it already offers this type of service and more to the publishing community, via a mixture of in-house development and third-party software. Handling all of IPC’s magazines, alongside a multitude of other publications, through the Emagine system, the company provides what managing director Les Pipe calls a "complete publishing solution". This includes, he says, a platform-agnostic approach to publishing and extensive client management and research.

"The service, the account management, the systems and the workflows, the flexibility, the cost, the ease of use – these are all part of the package," he says. "It is not just about a digital edition service – publishers want a complete system. So with Emagine, the assets come in and the client can send them to whatever output they want for whatever format. It also handles all other areas of pre-press, proofing, client approvals , cost rationalisation – and so much more. If you are going to try and get into this you need to be able to offer a complete solution, not just a solution for one area."

This approach has trebled the users of the Emagine system in the past seven months and put the company into profit, suggesting Pipe is onto something. But the printers YuDu and Aptus Interactive work with to provide a pure digital edition service have also generated substantially more work over the past year, suggesting it may not be completely necessary to go for as ‘complete’ a solution as Rhapsody.

What lesson does need to be taken from Rhapsody, and indeed the example of Pensord, is that digital editions are not just about plonking a print PDF online. Whether you buy in software, create your own, or do a bit of both like Rhapsody, the technology is only half the solution, as Rhapsody new media director Greg Feltham explains: "The client relationships and the talking to clients about what they need is just as, if not more, important as technology. It’s not just about throwing video or audio on the page – it is about content too, finding out whether readers want as much text on the page for a digital edition, for example, and if not, how can you get a situation where the software can deliver that?"

Coxon agrees: "A digital edition at the moment is essentially a print magazine being read on screen – and that does not work. It is designed to work in print. The tablet or smart phone experience demands something different to that. It can still be the same content, but it has to be delivered in a different way."

These content questions make the whole issue of digital magazines even more complex for printers and take it beyond a purely technological quandary. Unfortunately, it is clearly a quandary printers are going to have to find a solution to if they are to maintain their prime position with publishers. Granted, digital editions are a small fraction of the market at present, but if the current trend continues they will be an increasing part of a publisher’s output and printers need to ensure they can meet that requirement – otherwise someone else will and the printer could find themselves frozen out by a provider willing to embrace the full range of publisher requirements