Playboy and Bondi Digital Publishing Unveil www.playboyarchive.com Searchable Web Archive
Digital back issues of Playboy available for free viewing
LAS VEGAS, March 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- MICROSOFT MIX'09 SHOW -- Playboy Enterprises, Inc. (NYSE: PLA, PLAA) and Bondi Digital Publishing LLC, yesterday went live with the public beta version of www.playboyarchive.com, a website where web viewers can instantly view a collection of digital back issues of Playboy Magazine from each of the years 1954 through 2007 without charge.
In a first for Playboy, readers and fans will be able to go online and instantly browse, search and read a compilation of perfect digital back issues of the magazine, many of which are highly sought-after collectors' items. Each digital issue in the web archive will appear exactly as it did - including advertisements - in the original print edition of Playboy.
"Playboy has an incredibly rich history and an intensely loyal readership," says Hugh M. Hefner, Playboy Founder, Editor-in-Chief and Chief Creative Officer. "This is the perfect opportunity to offer them something they have always wanted and also a great way to allow a whole new generation to easily explore the magazine."
The system loads magazines quickly and users are finding it very easy to navigate. "We are impressed with the way Bondi's digital publishing web platform presents the digital editions - it's fast and easy to use. And the resolution Bondi was able to get makes the reading experience enjoyable," said Leopold Froehlich, Executive Editor.
To bring Playboy to life digitally, Bondi Digital Publishing - the software pioneers that developed the platform for The Complete New Yorker - scanned and re-typed each issue of Playboy. David Anthony, Co-Founder of Bondi noted: "Playboy has been an exceptionally influential part of America's cultural landscape for more than 50 years. We are thrilled to give people a whole new way to explore that history." That sentiment was echoed by Murat Aktar, co-founder of Bondi Digital Publishing who agreed and added: "It has been a five-year effort to get our system onto the Internet, so it is exciting to be getting such positive response from users on the new web platform."
The web component of Bondi's online digital publishing platform was created with the help of super-development house and Microsoft Partner of the Year award winner, Vertigo. The platform offers an end-to-end system for publishing and monetizing back archives of magazines on the web. It was launched and showcased during Microsoft's Mix developers conference in Las Vegas yesterday, and makes extensive use of Microsoft's rich media technology: Silverlight.
ABOUT PLAYBOY ENTERPRISES
Playboy is one of the most recognized and popular consumer brands in the world. Playboy Enterprises, Inc. is a media and lifestyle company that markets the brand through a wide range of media properties and licensing initiatives. The company publishes Playboy magazine in the United States and abroad and creates content for distribution via television networks, websites, mobile platforms, DVD and radio. Through licensing agreements, the Playboy brand appears in more than 150 countries on a wide range of consumer products, entertainment locations and retail stores.
ABOUT BONDI DIGITAL PUBLISHING
Bondi Digital Publishing has extensive experience helping magazine publishers create commercial opportunities from their print archives. Bondi has developed both online and offline software platforms for organizing and viewing vast collections of magazines. Individual issues are presented on our system as exact digital replicas of the print release with all of the rich formatting intact. In addition to being a familiar experience to readers, this allows magazines to release back issues under the original copyright.
Founded in 2004, Bondi set the standard for user-friendly, searchable digital magazine archives when The New Yorker selected the company to develop the software platform behind the Complete New Yorker, an eight DVD-ROM set containing almost 500,000 print pages. In 2007, Bondi published digital archives of the first 40 years of Rolling Stone magazine and it began releasing the complete run of Playboy magazine.
