Exact Editions iPhone and iPad apps get social media upgrade

Exact Editions, a platform for magazines seeking to publish their content as an app, has released version of its iOS app that includes social media integration and bookmarking.

Users can bookmark articles for later reading or share them via Facebook, Twitter, email or text message.

Social sharing is something that publishers using other app publishing platforms are also doing. Last week Dennis Publishing announced it had invested in app software Padify and was using the platform to produce apps with social and bookmarking features.

Daryl Rayner, managing director of Exact Editions told Journalism.co.uk why she thinks readers will benefit from the new features. "We feel that being able to delve into the content and highlight it and share it with other individuals who would be equally interested in that area is really useful."

Exact Editions creates apps for such titles as Music Week, Dazed and Confused, Total Politics and Gramophone, allowing users to search through the publication's entire archives and bookmark articles where necessary.

Although it is not practical to sync every issue to a mobile device, extensive searches can be saved alongside a record of social media interaction in separate folders or subfolders.

For publications like Gramophone, which has an archive dating back 1923, that can be particularly useful for readers or researchers if they need to compile a database of articles on a particular subject.

"It's Wagner's 200th birthday coming up," said Rayner, "so I could have a list of bookmarks surrounding Wagner that I could share with you if I know you like Wagner as well."

Additionally, this development creates a further platform for publishers to promote archived content for the creation of long-term revenue streams.

"When we work with magazines we work very much with their archives as well," continued Rayner. "We believe that magazines are interesting going forward with subscriptions but also going backwards, especially in terms of special interest magazines."

Robert Andrews, in his recent role as senior editor at paidContent/GigaOM, highlighted this potential benefit in October when it was announced that Gramophone had digitised all 1,000 editions of its back catalogue. He told Journalism.co.uk that he feels this is an improvement on what he sees the "significantly" limited sharing capabilities of iOS when compared with Android.

"These are worthwhile features and appear both to be part of Exact Editions's underlying platform and to leverage iOS's sharing feature," he said.

"Hats off to Exact for making a slight improvement to what is iOS's slightly inferior equivalent to Android's fuller-featured native content sharing capability."

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