I’ve been experimenting with creating a 8.5″ x 11″ INDD template to deploy a series of ongoing multi-page articles (documents) via three main distribution routes. Each document consists of text and linked images which are at least 300 dpi to ensure that articles can be printed if required.
1. Blogger via Custom Domain – Export document pages as low quality 72 dpi jpegs which are further compressed with ImageOptim. The images are stacked vertically within each blog post and designed to be read like a series of magazine pages by scrolling up or down. I’ve made some tests using Chrome’s mobile device emulator and tested using a cheap Tracfone with a slower Wifi network. I’ve also completed tests on desktops. Pages are watermarked with the site’s logo. This will be the primary content to drive users to the site with revenue being provided by specific affiliate ads related to my content. I modified the xhtml and css of one of Blogger’s existing templates which was created to be mobile ready as I don’t want to spend my time coding my own site.
2. PDF – Offer select articles, groups of articles, or larger sized articles as watermarked pdfs for download for a tiny fee (donation). I’ve tested a service for this that seems to work well.
3. Print – Offer collections of non-watermarked articles within a printed spiral bound book via Lula. I’ve tested Lulu’s INDD export plugin and uploaded a test product to a test Lulu store and it seemed to work well.
I’ve tried ePub, html and related apps and frankly do not like the way my content is being displayed. Rather than spending time writing these methods mean I would be spending most of my time tweaking various settings and software in the hopes the content might work on various devices.
Has anyone had any experience with #1 above? Essentially this would be a image blog consisting of magazine mages with text and image as content.
.
