ENTIRE PRINT HISTORY OF PLAYBOY AND ROLLING STONE MAGAZINES TO BE AVAILABLE ON THE WEB

Bondi Digital Publishing to launch searchable web magazine archive: www.covertocover.com
with Rolling Stone and Playboy magazines

LAS VEGAS, NV, March 18, 2009 – Bondi Digital Publishing LLC unveiled its new online magazine system today during the keynote address of the MIX09 conference put on by Microsoft Corp. in Las Vegas, NV and announced its plan to launch www.covertocover.com, a website using Microsoft Silverlight that allows users to browse, search and purchase digital back issues of magazines. Bondi has confirmed that Playboy and Rolling Stone will be the first two magazine archives to become available later this year.

For the first time Rolling Stone and Playboy readers and fans will be able to go online and instantly browse, search, purchase and read perfect digital back issues of both magazines, many of which are highly sought after collectors’ items. Each digital issue in the Web archive will be available for single issue purchase and will appear exactly as it did – including advertisements – in the original print editions.

Attendees at the MIX09 conference got the first preview of www.covertocover.com when a pre-launch beta version of the site was showcased by Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Platform at Microsoft, during his keynote speech. “Using Microsoft Silverlight, Bondi has created a quick-loading, natural and intuitive way to browse and read magazines online,” said Guthrie. “covertocover.com is an exceptional example of the powerful, cost effective and interactive rich Internet applications Silverlight can create, and Microsoft is pleased to highlight this stunning customer solution on-stage at one of its biggest conferences of the year.”

To bring Rolling Stone and Playboy to life digitally, Bondi Digital Publishing – the software pioneers who developed the platform for The Complete New Yorker – scanned and re-typed 636 issues of Playboy (a total of over 115,000 printed pages and more than 93,000 photos) as well as all 1024 issues of Rolling Stone through May 2007 (over 125,000 printed pages). Murat Aktar, Co-Founder of Bondi noted: “It is great to be able to launch covertocover.com with two of the most interesting and iconic magazines in the world.” David Anthony, co-founder of Bondi Digital Publishing, agreed and added: “People really seem to like the site. We’ve been working on perfecting the experience of reading magazines digitally for over five years so it is exciting to be getting such positive response from users on the new web system.”

To help build the www.covertocover.com experience, Bondi Digital Publishing engaged Vertigo, a Silverlight design and development company in the San Francisco area.
Bondi had very specific goals for building their Web experience “We were given two top priorities: to provide as close to a magazine reading and browsing experience on the Web as possible, and to offer an interactive search system enabling users to find just the content they’re looking for,” said Scott Stanfield, CEO of Vertigo. “These were ambitious goals. With a combination of Microsoft Silverlight 2, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Vertigo’s BigPicture™ product we nailed both goals.”

www.covertocover.com takes advantage of Silverlight Deep Zoom, allowing users to smoothly pan and zoom magazine content. Bondi is currently evaluating the new features of Silverlight 3 and considering adding features such as pixel shaders and perspective transforms to provide a richer experience with www.covertocover.com.

The general public will get their first look at the site in the summer of 2009 when the public beta launches.

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.

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