White-labelling and keeping out of the picture
Exact Editions platform is a streaming solution for access management to magazines, and if need be, Exact Editions can pretty much step out of the picture. Leaving the magazine rooted in the publisher’s website with the Exact Editions service chugging away in the internet-connected background as a trusted utility.
My ‘mental model’ for what Exact Editions is doing when we step out of the picture is that the content database which handles digital magazines is always, 24X7, working as a ‘magazine utility’ churning through page views, issues, archives and search or browsing requests. Depending on the wishes of the publisher, the content can be delivered in streams to:
- individuals (usually via a standard: email/password combination). Exact Editions will be in the frame with subscriptions and support, or to
- institutions (usually via the IP address of the library or business). Exact Editions will be filling the frame for the libraries and handling renewals and support, or to
- alternative web addresses which in effect manage/control the user-audience experience. Exact Editions may be more of a background presence…
When content is being served/streamed by the Exact Editions systems but the content is perhaps not listed or findable from www.exacteditions.com we are pretty much ‘stepping out of the picture’.
On the other hand: Exact Editions can also, step back into the picture by setting up a temporary promotional collection of four quite dissimilar magazines which do use the White-Labelling approach:
This preview collection of four titles, each of them White-Labelled, will be available for inspection and exploration until the end of the year.
If a magazine is only (or primarily) available from the publisher’s own website we call this a White-Labelled solution. The audience will probably reach the content from the publisher’s web pages, via a portal, a paywall, a membership login or a clickable link. In these circumstances, Exact Editions will have very little idea or information on who, or how many users, are accessing the magazine. The intention of a White-Labelled solution of this type is that the audience and any data about individual users remains on the publisher’s side of the interaction. Further, it is — as it always should be — up to the publisher whether and how much content is seen by the world at large.
The corollary of a such a “delegated”, hands-off, delivery is that Exact Editions cannot totally show a White-Labelled solution to a third party. If you want the ‘inward’ user experience of climbing through the frame and entering a White-Labelled magazine it would be best to sign up to When Saturday Comes to check on the latest news with football (soccer); or become a member of The Royal Society of Biology to learn from The Biologist; for Garden Rail Magazine join the World of Railways; or Family Tree magazine via Family Tree Plus.
On the other hand, all these magazines have use of the Reading Rooms toolset available to publishers on the Exact Editions platform, so Exact Editions can demo or showcase the way a collection of magazines will work with their preview, default ‘open’ pages. That is the link given above. It will last until the end of the year.
There are further subtleties to the choice and implementation of a White-Labelled solution. First, we should notice that the choice is not binary. The magazine publisher may decide to add in some of Exact Editions’ other delivery options for example individual or institutional sales. Second, the publisher may be using White-Labelling for content which is intended to be completely open and so with no need for the Exact Editions system for producing partial previews. We will mention some examples of totally White-Labelled content, quite removed from the www.exacteditions.com frame, in a forthcoming blog.
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