With the rise of Amazon’s Kindle and now the iPad, digital books and periodicals are quickly becoming a mainstay. Open-source, often free, and highly functional, the EPUB format allows publications and documents to flow across multiple devices–with a level of interactivity that can offer a multi-dimensional user experience.
So why go digital with medical publications? Here are a few clear benefits:
- Faster to Publish and Distribute – The traditional printing process is much more time consuming than electronic publishing. eBooks may also offer quicker lead time to publication and distribution due to much improved ease-of-edit. eBooks can be emailed or transmitted wirelessly.
- Vastly Increased Interactivity – eBooks can be embedded with multimedia, linked to references, and developed with a truly interactive user experience. Readers will be able to interact with content not possible with flat print pieces.
- Cost Benefit – Easier to publish and distribute. No more printing costs.
- Digital Book Readers are Evolving – With nearly 75% of healthcare professionals using some sort of smarthphone or PDA, it’s clear that the user base is ready and willing to embrace eBooks as the format of choice. And digital book readers are only getting more advanced (and going down in cost).
There are other clear benefits as well — ease-of-translation and lower cost of subscription being good examples.
For healthcare marketers, developing digital periodicals can allow information to be disseminated to large audiences faster and more efficiently than ever before. And embedded interactivity and cross-linking may improve core messaging and help differentiate a product. Digital distribution is also untapped channel for marketers.
Even better — new tools and applications are allowing documents created for print to be quickly converted an optimized for digital distribution. The ability to easily share could make interactive eBooks a boon for a mobile salesforce.
There are already a number of medical and scientific publications free to the public. Leading medical journals like the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA are already distributing digitally. Try Medical eBooks or FreeBooks4Doctors for some great examples.
