Our Media has been distributing some of their gorgeous and informative magazines through the Exact Editions platform steadily growing the library and institutional market. These are popular magazines with a strong educational appeal: BBC Music Magazine, BBC Science Focus Magazine, BBC Sky at Night Magazine, BBC Wildlife Magazine.
Their current and latest issues can be sampled here. The samples give a searchable and browseable view of each issue (thumbnail images) and the first five pages can be read at full size. That link giving a preview of this group of titles is an Exact Editions Reading Room.
Reading Rooms are a method publishers can use to grant temporary access to content in a magazine or a group of magazines. They have the following characteristics:
(1) Access to the Reading Room is time-limited (standard choices are for: an hour, a day, a week, or 30 days).
(2) The Reading Room can open up a single issue or a complete archive.
(3) The publisher can determine how much of a single issue should be made open through the Reading Room (the rest of the issue being searchable).
(4) The links are shareable as users are not required to register or qualify.
(5) As new issues are published and time passes, the content will update automatically.
(6) The content is only available for time-limited period when the Reading Room is set up (normally for: an hour, a day, a week, or 30 days). Once the time-limit is passed no content will be accessible.
These feature all rely on the fact that the Exact Editions solution is a streaming solution. The magazine content does not need to live in the reader or user’s device and much the work is done by databases and software in the cloud.
Exact Editions developed this system as a way of promoting titles, especially for Institutional subscriptions (libraries and site licenses). For example, here is a useful collection of key science titles, three from Our Media, that will be valuable to many educational licensees:
Our Media have recently added four more titles to their set available from Exact Editions and it is a simple matter to generate a bigger Reading Room which provides a continually updated display of current issues from those titles that can be browsed and searched. And the system will also generate a QR code for the publisher to include in advertisements or printed catalogues:
Why put such a QR code on a piece of printed publicity that may have a shelf life of 6 months or more? Answer: the QR code takes the user to a Reading Room which will show the current issues whenever the QR code is used. If you are reading this blog in a few weeks you might compare the view from the QR code with the current state of the collection:
Should Our Media choose to add another resource to their collection, that title would pop up and nudge its way into the Reading Room. Reading Rooms are flexible, they update with current issues, and their borders are elastic if a title is added or removed. It is the publisher’s decision to publish new issues and it is their decision which titles belong in which collection.
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