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Zmags is a web-based service that enables you to produce any publication in the form of an online magazine. The idea is not original by any means, but it provides a way to deliver your content online in a format that some readers may prefer to a PDF or navigating a website. And because it's a web service, you are in complete control of the process from upload to delivery.
The good news is it's fairly straightforward, but you have to make sure that your PDF is small enough (the one we got to work was around 5MB) for Zmags' processing, and you have to be prepared to build all of your hyperlinks manually - a timeconsuming and tedious task. The whole process is fully customizable, so you can brand your Zmags publication with your colors and logo. Or, if you prefer, you can use one of the predefined templates. Once you post a publication, you can host it on your own site or leave it on the Zmags site; then you can track traffic, pages, bounce rates, and other key statistics.
OUR TEST CASE
In order to test the software we decided to create our own online publication, an ebook composed of a collection of my articles about enterprise search. I wrote an introduction to tie it together, and we got Daniel Tunkelang, chief scientist and cofounder at Endeca, to write a foreword. Finally, we worked with designer Kerri Fice to create a cover and a nice design for the new pages as well as the table of contents and a resources page.
There wasn't time to redesign the entire ebook, so we used the existing print page designs for most of the content. Based on the resulting ebook, I would suggest that you create a separate design for online publication that doesn't require readers to zoom in to read the text. During the process, we also learned that the Zmags interface couldn't ingest a high-resolution PDF, and we had to dial back to a smaller, lower quality version. Overall, the basic conversion from PDF to Zmag worked fairly smoothly, with only minor problems.
(You can view the publication, Unlock the Power of Enterprise Search, at http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/51641367.)
UPLOADING THE PUBLICATION
After creating a publication...