"Digital magazines are either passé or the next big thing - depending who you listen to," writes Robert Andrews, editor of Paidcontent:UK.

Digital magazines, in PDF version, are online replicas of a print product that offer readers the experience of reading a traditional magazine. Many magazines use this format to be eco-friendly.

In line with the argument of digital mags being passé, Drift, a digital surfing magazine launched in 2005, is switching to a printed format. It originally began in a paperless format as an alternative to tree-based paper.
 
Drift Editor Howard Swanwick said, "With the internet there's a lifecycle with these things - buzzwords such as digital magazine, podcast, blogging - they tend to come and go. I think digital magazines have had their day. As a medium to put features in, they don't work."

Drift also had problems selling space because "advertisers did not understand the digital format" according to Swanwick.

On the other hand, The National Union of Journalists' monthly mail-out members' magazine The Journalist is going online, ending all print publications to save print, post, and packaging costs.

Furthermore, Courrier International.com peruses an article in Die Tageszeitung by correspondent Gina Bucher, who deems PDF magazines such as John Magazine and Dot-to-dot-mag to be the new trend on the Internet because of their layout. Text, photographs or illustrations are displayed exactly the same on everyone's copy because PDF is a file format compatible on various platforms.

Magazines, digital or not, are still figuring out which platform works best, but newspapers may want to further experiment with PDFs or other digital formats on certain sections to save costs.

Source: Paidcontent.org, Press Gazette , Courrier International.com (in French)