Since 2009, ScandAsia has published 364 ScandAsia publications on Issuu, plus 13 editions of Thailand Expat Guide and 49 issues of Thai-Danish Trade News publishhed for the Danish Thai Cham ber of Commerce and 13 issues of the Thai Sweden Review published for the Thai-Swedish Chamber of Commerce.
ScandAsia publications constitute a comprehensive and accessible digital library for readers interested in the history of the Nordic communities in South East Asia. We are therefore in the process of migrating this entire digital magazine archive to a new publishing platform, Yumpu.com, following an unexpected and significant change in pricing by our former digital publishing provider, Issuu.com.
During our time with Issuu.com – which was developed by a Danish (of course) group of visionary programmers and marketers – we were chosen to be the first adopters of Issuu’s innovative collaborative tools for writers, editors, and photographers, which helped shape the production of our digital magazines. It was an exciting time – until today there is no available tool that matches this for magazine publishers.
Two years ago, Issuu decided to increase the price of the plan including the collaboration feature significantly and we decided to downgrade and found other ways to collaborate with the writers, photographers, editors and designers – working with the features provided in our Google Business plan – a combination of folders and sheets. It worked albeit not as smart but at a price, we could afford.
We downgraded to a plan called Premium Annual, which cost USD 480 per year. This allowed us to maintain our presence on the platform without the more advanced features.
Then in October 2024, Issuu again restructured their plans and somebody thought is was smart to eliminate the previous plans and offering users only three options: a Basic free account, a Starter plan, or an Unlimited Annual plan at USD 2,259 per year—a substantial increase of USD 1,779 from our previous arrangement.
Just before the weekend, we received an invoice from Issuu and, on the same day, our PayPal account was automatically charged the full USD 2,259, although we had not requested an upgrade. We immediately initiated a dispute with PayPal and opened a dialogue with Issuu support. While Issuu provided detailed instructions on how to cancel our subscription, we were disappointed that our original plan had been removed without prior agreement and that the upgrade had been processed without our consent.
We have since downloaded all our published magazines from Issuu and cancelled the subscription. PayPal ruled in ScandAsia’s favor and granted us a full refund, recognizing that we had not actively requested the upgrade.
At present, our Issuu profile is on the free Basic tier, which limits the visibility and availability of our publications on the platform. This may explain why readers are currently unable to access past issues as before.
To continue offering our full digital magazine archive, ScandAsia is migrating to a new provider, Yumpu.com, which has extended a special onboarding offer to publishers transitioning away from Issuu.
“We receive daily complaints about this price increase and the lack of communication,” says Yumpu.com in a reply when ScandAsia asked if they could help us with the migration.
“We know this causes many inconveniences on your end, but I am happy to tell you we are used to this migration part and can help. Package-wise, we have a special offer for ISSUU migrations.”
Once the migration is complete, all 480+ back issues of ScandAsia will once again be fully accessible to our readers.
We will publish an update as soon as our digital library is live on the new platform.
