PUBLISHING

Plain (ASCII) text files: these were the standard medium for self-published
electronic magazines (‘e-zines’) and electronic ‘samizdat’ (Soviet hand-copied
underground) books from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Since the plain-text
format has remained stable since 1963, this is in fact the most resilient form
of experimental electronic publishing. The website textfiles.com provides a
rich archive of the plain-text electronic publishing subculture from the 1970s
to the 1990s.
ART/DESIGN PERIODICAL
Periodicals such as yearbooks and magazines are an important part of the art
and culture publishing scene. Examples of influential electronic art periodicals
include OPEN and e-flux . The spectrum includes everything from non-commercial
websites or PDF publications, to academic and public magazines,
to commercial websites and app store subscription models. At the moment,
digital magazine publishing is in a process of gradually transitioning from
traditional to new workflows. On a scale from traditional to new, offering a
magazine as a downloadable PDF file is the most traditional solution, while
turning a magazine into a website (running on a content management system
such as WordPress) is the least traditional. All of these technical solutions are
now finally mature after two decades of online news publishing. WordPress
would be our standard recommendation for small-to-medium scale online
news and journal publishing, since it is a highly developed, user-friendly,
customizable and furthermore Open Source system. The main problem for
publishing electronic periodicals is no longer the technology but rather the
revenue model.
Aside from revenue, the main editorial question is: should the publication still
be considered as one medium, or is it better to give up entirely on the traditional
system of periodical appearance in bundled issues? Alternatively, the
model could be a continuously updated website (similar to a news website or
a blog), or with a focus on providing single articles rather than bundled issues,
based on search engine hits, social media recommendations, etc. The difference
between a ‘blog’ and a ‘magazine’, however, is becoming increasingly
difficult to define.
115