Welcome to the February issue of Orthodontic Products. This issue is a major milestone in our history because it marks the debut of our digital edition.
What’s a digital edition? For starters, it’s the whole magazine in a digital form that you can flip through online or download and read at your leisure. But it’s more than that. It expands the scope of the print publication to include videos, slide shows, and links (to related articles, to featured orthodontists’ Web sites, to companies that sell a certain category of product—the possibilities are as large as the Internet itself).
Why a digital edition? First, let me say that the arrival of this new information delivery system does not mean that we are forsaking print. If you relish holding a paper-and-ink magazine in your hand, we are happy to keep providing it to you. The digital edition is a digital addition. I happen to think it is, to use a technical term, “really cool,” but it’s also a logical continuation of our mission to provide as many orthodontists as possible with practical information in as many ways as possible, so that practitioners around the world can make Orthodontic Products a part of their professional lives in whatever way suits them best.
I like to think of Orthodontic Products as an information buffet (a fancy one, though: more Bellagio than Sizzler). Ten years ago, when we were just a magazine, we offered 10 hearty meals a year, and that was it. Now we still offer those meals, but we also offer smaller bites of information served a variety of ways.
You can bookmark our Web site and follow our daily news items via RSS; you can subscribe to our weekly e-newsletter; you can carry on a conversation with your peers through our social media troika of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And now the digital edition adds another station to our information buffet, so you can fill your plate with the tastiest tidbits of your choosing.
So whether you’re hungry for new pliers or some branding tips from a successful young orthodontist, I encourage you to check out the digital edition. If you have questions or opinions about it that you’d like to share, I am, as always, happy to hear from you.
Christopher Piehler
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