It has been learned that Virtual Paper, a digital edition solutions company based in Montreal, will stop support for their flash based digital edition service as of December 31, 2017. This will cause a lot of problems to all the magazine publishers that have been using their software to produce the digital editions of their magazine. This development means publishers will have to reproduce the archives of their magazine and absorb the extra costs to do it plus find a new solution going forward. It seems quite unfair to leave your customers like this.

Source: http://4.bp.blogspot.com

This is a major problem why cloud based software services are no good for publishers as they lose control of their content as they do not own it. Technology companies as you see can arbitrarily discontinue their service anytime and leave their customers high and dry. They are offering their customers a free upgrade to an html5 cloud service, but the same risk still applies. They would still have to pay the annual subscription fees going foward but they still will not have control of their content. This is not a good long term solution for any publisher.

The ideal solution is to take it in-house where publishers don’t have to pay the lifetime subscription fees and they own and control the content. Here is a solution that may fit that it is been using by Pets Magazine as part of their digital strategy and it s called FlipPageMaker. They bought FlipBook Creator  for Mac software for $99 with the ability to make unlimited editions with no extra fees. You can check out the digital edition of Pets Magazine at this link to see for your self.