Exact Editions has worked with Magazines Canada to present a showcase of 60 magazine issues from their publisher members. The showcase was publicised today and will be open until 1 April 2027. Our joint aim was to collect and demonstrate a digital collection celebrating Canada’s vibrant and varying magazine publishing industry. The collection is not permanent but it will be a reliable and shareable magazine landmark for the year in which it is running. All the issues are complete, open, browseable and searchable from https://exacted.me/MagazinesCanada
The variety of the publications is itself a testimony to the continuing value and attractiveness of the illustrated magazine format; the continuing importance of news, editorial, fiction, and images that are high fashion, high tech and back to nature. It is also a showcase for the Exact Editions platform — which is certainly one reason, perhaps the predominant motive, for agreeing to compile and deliver it. There was a good deal of work at our end, but we have an established, largely automated, process that affords a free trialling service for any magazine that may be considering running content through the platform. So it was a matter of asking the publishers to put an issue through the trial process, and then stick the issues together in a unified framework (a bespoke database for the set). We were pleased by the response rate from the magazines as they responded to the Magazines Canada invitation and have wondered whether there would be a way of running a similar collective showcase of sample magazines, either for another national grouping or across a theme that is of broad interest. Imaginative proposals will be considered.
Readers who come in to sample the Magazines Canada collection may well assume that it is composed of PDF’s of the issues included. PDF’s for each issue were submitted by the publishers, but the output that readers explore in their enjoyment of the collection are not PDF files. It is more useful to think of the collection as a small virtual database (carefully crafted from the Exact Editions magazines repository) — a database which serves the selected content pages to the users in real time. A web database which is bespoke for this collection and responsive to initiatives taken by the user.
As the showcase is presented under the umbrella of Magazines Canada and we expect that most users and readers will come to it via the web pages that describe it there. But the showcase is also a vehicle for promoting individual titles through their sample issues, so the publishers can be expected to create links to their front covers presented in the collection. Any pages in the collection can be shared via email and social media, so that any linking to the content is potentially viral. You may be directed to a story about ravens in the Inuit Art Quarterly but when you get there the whole magazine issue, and the collection, in which it sits, is open to browsing. Readers do not have to come into the collection via the opening page. Anyone who gets hold of a link can enjoy the database without registering, obtaining permission or any identity checks. The reading is free and should be private. Neither Exact Editions nor Magazines Canada are collecting individual data from users.
This is a historic moment in which Canadians are firmly asserting that they are “the true North strong and free” and so a good moment in which all of us can sample and enjoy this celebration of Canadian magazines and their diverse issues.
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