Publishing
What makes an ePaper worth reading
Most ePapers are a PDF in a viewer. The difference between that and something readers come back to is three decisions.
If you print, you already have the hardest part: an edition that someone laid out with judgement about what matters most today. A front page is an editorial argument. The web version usually throws that away and shows a list of headlines in reverse-chronological order instead.
1. Keep the page, but make it tappable
A reader should see the page as designed — the lead story big, the column where it always is — and be able to tap any article on it to get readable text. A PDF viewer gives you the first half and asks the reader to pinch and zoom for the second. On a phone, which is where most of your readers are, that's where they leave.
Clickable regions over each story are the whole trick. The page stays the page; tapping a headline opens the story at a size people can actually read.
2. Yesterday matters more than you think
Readers look for the edition they missed far more often than publishers expect — a result, a notice, a name in a list. If your archive only goes back a week, or the dates are hard to navigate, you're throwing away traffic you already paid to produce.
3. Every language gets its own edition
If you print in two languages you have two editions, not one edition with a toggle. Readers should land on their language's pages by default, with the other available but not in the way.