It’s taken me a while to write this summary but late last year I was introduced to the recent brainchild of a Slovenian company, the eDition online publishing platform. Interestingly 2 publications have recently moved from the UK based popular Ceros company to eDition, sparking an interest for me in their product. Upon further inspection it seems that they have put together an excellent package.

All the familiar articles are present, page turn is there and working smoothly, full customisation is available to all customers and most importantly for the readers, it runs very smoothly.

Unlike Ceros it has one very appealing feature, you can upload any of your content as when you require. You can upload your own PDFs and your own SWFs. This is a major factor on a day to day production basis. The Ceros platform is somewhat limited in its user friendliness because all files have to pass through its production staff, although very helpful it’s just an unnecessary middle process. It also has its benefits of course since you know you are only one phone call away from human help.

It can however be a major pain in the ass, what you want is to be able to control and upload your files when you want, and make changes when you want. eDtion allows you to do just that using its very nifty little layout programme. It’s simple and pretty easy to use but unfortunately only installs on Windows. It’s just a little thing but I, along with most designers (i think) don’t really like Windows, it sucks! I’m a Mac person and like working on a Mac, the last thing I want to do is pay for and install Windows on my Mac. A small grip I know, just a shame they don’t support Mac natively.

All in all though, good things to be said: It has a good search engine for PDF info, you can customise the background colour and toolbar, something Brand Art Editors have been wanting to do for ages now. You can use MP3s! Easy ways to get audio reviews, podcasts or music integrated into a magazine page – finally!
You can also add a logo into the toolbar, something incredibly simple but can make a massive difference when trying to get your brand on the tip of everyone’s tongue.

The statistics side of it works well also, individual page views, time of page views, individual clicks, referrals, search results and search engine stats that your webpage has been found by (super useful). Excellent stuff.

As a reader a couple of things kick ass. The zoom function allows multiple levels of zooming in with PDF rendering being spot on at each level and fast loading. Zoom can be controlled easily from your customised toolbar and is very simple and intuitive.
Secondly you can grab the page and move it around the screen like a photoshop document on an infinite pasteboard, something I ended up fooling around with just because it was fun!

The contents panel and send to a friend panels float nicely on top of the page instead of taking you away to an email application or shrinking your mag size. Keeping focus and interest in the magazine is really important, its easy to forget that the very nature of the internet has people hopping around from page to page. If you can your reader on page for longer then your stats will look a lot better to advertisers, as well as proving that your doing something interesting.

In conclusion eDition is an excellent platform and has quickly become one of the best options on the web for ezine publishing. They seem to have really sat down and thought, not only about the finished result but equally important, the usability from a production point of view. Superior to many on the market eDition is great for large publishing houses and indispensable for smaller independent publishers.

Anyway don’t take my word for it, head over to the address below for an interactive demo, watch the videos they give a really good idea of how it all works.
http://public.edition-on.net/Presentation/easy.html

Click below for a page of current publications online at eDition:
http://www.edition-on.net/reference_eng

Click below for their homepage:
http://www.edition-on.net/english/home.html