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February 6, 2008

Finally, a Web-based PDF Viewer That Does Not Suck (Issuu)

Erick Schonfeld

74 comments »

issuu-logo.pngThere are plenty of ways to embed documents into Web pages, from Scribd to DocStoc. But when it comes to replicating the look and feel of a magazine or book, most digital efforts fall flat. (Olive Software comes to mind—we used that over at Time Inc. to create Web-viewable versions of the magazines, but it was too slow and required a separate client download. Conde Nast’s Flip also takes forever—Mike covered it here.) But our man in France, Ouriel Ohayon, just sent me a link to Issuu, a company that does it right. Issuu lets you upload a PDF and then flip through it seamlessly on a dedicated Webpage or in a small embedded widget (see below). The pages flip fast, and you get a good sense of the layout, even at a small scale. Click on the widget and it takes you to the full page.

Unfortunately, Ohayon also showed Robert Scoble, who is sitting right next to him at a conference in Switzerland and has already posted his thoughts. Beating all of us to the punch, however, is Webware, who discovered Issuu two days ago. I am not sure what took us all so long. The company has been around since 2006 and is based in Denmark.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 9:49 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

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Comments

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  1. Indian Videos

    February 6th, 2008 at 10:06 am

    Practical and Nice!!! wow

  2. SEarch- Engines WEB

    February 6th, 2008 at 10:08 am

    THANK YOU!!! PDF’s downfall would eventually be its unfriendly user experience … :-(

  3. Jason R

    February 6th, 2008 at 10:26 am

    This plugin on your front page just crashed my firefox 2.0.0.11 5 times in a row. I had lots of other tabs open but after closing the techcrunch tab it stopped crashing. Maybe it does suck. If it matters I also have del.icio.us 1.2, managesoft usage agent web tracker 7.9, and web developer 1.1.4 plugins installed.

  4. Pradeep:whizolver

    February 6th, 2008 at 10:29 am

    This is interesting…being a designer, makes sending and sharing my portfolio easier…

    http://whizolve.com/Consultant.....x?cnslt=35

  5. Brian

    February 6th, 2008 at 10:33 am

    Hey Erick,

    shouldn’t “Issue” in “who discovered Issue two days ago” be spelled “Issuu?”

  6. Zach Weisman

    February 6th, 2008 at 10:38 am

    This could change the world.

    Honestly, I could see myself reading a magazine via web browser like this. It would be really cool of the embeddable widget had a full screen button. Perhaps it does though…

    How can one monetize the distribution of content?

  7. Nick

    February 6th, 2008 at 10:45 am

    Its probably not been discovered properly until now because the front page copy is pretty vague and doesn’t really tell you anything about this BIG point of difference.
    They should use your headline in their copy ‘Issuu - a web-based PDF viewer that doesn’t suck’

  8. cyder67

    February 6th, 2008 at 10:48 am

    Jason, I’m using Firefox/2.0.0.11 and it works like a charm. It’s probably the browser itself, gets tired sometimes and needs a restart :)

    Anyway - great site, Erick!

  9. JV

    February 6th, 2008 at 10:50 am

    It does have a fullscreen option. The link is at top right. Wow. This is a really smooth app.

  10. Bill Hartzer

    February 6th, 2008 at 10:59 am

    >>I am not sure what took us all so long. The company has been around since 2006 and is based in Denmark.

    Good things come to those who wait? It’s about time that there’s a decent PDF viewer. They should definitely use your headline for their marketing, just like Nick suggests. ;)

  11. Marzipan from Toledo

    February 6th, 2008 at 11:01 am

    This shit is sick yo!

  12. Marc

    February 6th, 2008 at 11:02 am

    Wouldn’t it be nice if Issuu were a web service invoked automatically when you click on a pdf link on any site?

  13. Richie Cunningham

    February 6th, 2008 at 11:05 am

    you’re right, it doesn’t suck.

  14. Jean Moniatte

    February 6th, 2008 at 11:15 am

    There are so many good things that you miss :-)

  15. John Kuo

    February 6th, 2008 at 11:27 am

    Looks like a nice Flex app… it failed on processing the PDFs I uploaded though :(. Really nice UI and functionality otherwise.

  16. dave

    February 6th, 2008 at 11:28 am

    marc (above) - awesome idea - OR you could just get a mac and do this in safari.

  17. Chris

    February 6th, 2008 at 11:36 am

    Even this needs moving about to read the whole issue. I think Flash reader is a better option for online reading, it is like reading a book. Here is an example.
    http://cmadras.com/360/360c1.swf

  18. Shambhu Borah

    February 6th, 2008 at 11:38 am

    Fantastic.

  19. Dyde

    February 6th, 2008 at 11:44 am

    This wants Flash and complains about updating the Flash Player. I have Flash Player 9.0.1 and it wants 9.0.2? Not to mention it crashes Safari after giving me this helpful message. Thanks, I’ll stick to using a real PDF viewer, which doesn’t crash anything.

  20. Webside Ventures

    February 6th, 2008 at 12:03 pm

    Pretty cool stuff. I actually wrote about this last week:

    http://websideventures.com/200.....ith-issuu/

  21. Jason

    February 6th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

    It definitely looks nice, but it doesn’t work as well as an embeddable document for reading as Scribd does.

  22. Marco Johnson

    February 6th, 2008 at 12:24 pm

    The first thing you see when you click into the demo page is toilet graffiti that says “EAT A CUNT !!”. They might want to get a better demo…

  23. adam

    February 6th, 2008 at 12:26 pm

    absolutely beautiful.
    say farewell to e-zines.

  24. Koray Al

    February 6th, 2008 at 12:45 pm

    It works nice on Firefox 3b2

    But I had to create an exception for issuu.com in “AdBlock Plus” extension for this to work.

    It will be a nice alternative for people that don’t/can’t have any pdf viewer installed on their computers. I guess if this one becomes more popular, it could be the “youtube” of documents.

  25. Tessa

    February 6th, 2008 at 12:45 pm

    Credit where credit is due: The Next Web blog beat all of you, and posted this 4 days ago: http://thenextweb.org/2008/02/.....-20-style/

  26. Eric Dewhirst

    February 6th, 2008 at 12:46 pm

    Awesome!

  27. Webside Ventures

    February 6th, 2008 at 1:01 pm

    @25 - I posted mine on 1/29 if you want to get stupid about it.

  28. .rb

    February 6th, 2008 at 1:03 pm

    acquisition target for Google Catalogs

    http://catalogs.google.com/cat.....amp;lcat=0

  29. mathew johnson

    February 6th, 2008 at 1:14 pm

    is this pagegangster?

  30. Faisal

    February 6th, 2008 at 1:25 pm

    Hello,

    This is one is better :

    http://vuzit.com/

    Unlike issuu , you could also upload documents by URL , not only by uploading it manually.

  31. Larry Larrikin

    February 6th, 2008 at 1:58 pm

    30: vuzit is slow and not nearly as elegant.

    issuu should get snapped up pretty quickly. They can add the “upload documents by URL” feature with less than 5 minutes of coding.

  32. Naomi

    February 6th, 2008 at 2:19 pm

    Great to have some chatter on this topic. The only thing I wanted to say is that Olive has never had a client download aspect to their offering, so wondering if you are thinking of someone else?

  33. benkoe

    February 6th, 2008 at 3:53 pm

    this is oooooooooold. swiss evening newspaper HEUTE uses issuu for publishing it’s pdf-epaper - since today :-)
    http://www.heute-abend.ch/epaper/

  34. Mark

    February 6th, 2008 at 3:57 pm

    Actually its not a pdf viewer, its an image viewer. They Convert the pdf on their servers to jpg’s.

  35. Coffee Man

    February 6th, 2008 at 4:53 pm

    I can see a revenue model coming that allows private access to documents for companies and individuals that don’t want the whole world to be able to view their information.

    All documents are public access since it wasn’t mentioned. There are currently no privacy options.

    Can you say HUGE money…..I’d pay for it tomorrow if it was available. Until then I don’t have a lot of use for it.

  36. EBH

    February 6th, 2008 at 5:58 pm

    There is nothing new here, and it does crash firefoxes.

    It REALLY makes me wonder HOW MUCH Arrington and Ackerman-Greenberg got paid to push this website on the rest of us suckers.

    “It will change the world” all right.

  37. joe

    February 6th, 2008 at 7:29 pm

    Awesome! But as Mark said, it´s an image viewer with a conversion tool.

  38. Shinjiro

    February 6th, 2008 at 7:40 pm

    The viewer is pretty smooth but the website is too slow IMHO

  39. Abdul Qabiz

    February 6th, 2008 at 8:04 pm

    A lot of credit goes to the architect/developer of this app:-

    Manish Jethani - http://www.linkedin.com/in/mjethani

    http://manishjethani.com/blog/

    -abdul

  40. Manish

    February 6th, 2008 at 11:48 pm

    This is grt……i love it….

  41. Zach Weisman

    February 7th, 2008 at 12:32 am

    http://www.collegenews.com/mag

  42. Zach Weisman

    February 7th, 2008 at 12:37 am

    (Google + University of Michigan + Issuu) = The end of microfilm.

  43. Frankie the dude

    February 7th, 2008 at 12:52 am

    Issuu got it all - great

  44. Ian

    February 7th, 2008 at 1:24 am

    This crashed my firefox v2.0.0.11 repeatedly, so I’m using IE7 to view the page now and can’t even see the widget. It sure looked good though in the few seconds before it crashed my browser.

  45. Manish Jethani

    February 7th, 2008 at 5:01 am

    @#39: Thanks for that plug, Abdul.

    Since we’re talking of credit, Issuu is the work of a brilliant team. Check out their people page.

    http://blog.issuu.com/?page_id=19

    This very elegant viewer is the concept and design of Michael. The slick visual and UX design is by Ruben. UI components by Yan and Jimmi.

    Very happy to see this appreciated by end-users. If you hit any issues either with the widget or on the site, please report to feedback (at) issuu.com.

    Also, Issuu is hiring (based in Copenhagen, Denmark):

    http://issuu.com/about/jobs

  46. cyder67

    February 7th, 2008 at 5:09 am

    @ 34: after playing some more a true expert such as myself can say: it’s stays as vector gfx after conversion and the data is extracted and feed their search engine. googlelicios :D

  47. Marcus

    February 7th, 2008 at 6:20 am

    The user experience is very nice, but the content isn’t being indexed by search engines, so the user is taking a PDF - which is visible to Google - and turning it into something that isn’t. Does anybody really think that’s a good idea?

    Shameless plug: Our digital magazines (NYLON, Dr. Dobbs and more) get read by more than 1 million readers every month and most people don’t think they suck. Including Google. ;)

  48. icejammer

    February 7th, 2008 at 6:21 am

    Interesting business model, wonder how they keep the servers running?

  49. xin chen

    February 7th, 2008 at 7:57 am

    I like their interface, but not sure issuu is a scalable solution, each page in PDP is turned out to be close to 1MB when converted to flash. although I don’t see any performance problem now, but not so sure if this service can support larger audiences

  50. Nicholas Bieber

    February 7th, 2008 at 8:47 am

    I remember mucking around with this idea a nigh on 12 months ago, someone said “wouldn’t it be great if…” but then lots of other more mundane work came down the pipeline. there was some nice page flipping code at Flashkit looked at, and there is some software - http://www.swftools.org/ which does PDF2SWF conversion. there was a korean group that we were looking to imitate.Their thing only ran in IE, but it was really, really well done, they had a normal magazine laid out, and you could zoom right in on the text.

    Maybe if they opened it up, instead of upping a PDF, you could generate a book from a page, or your own images - family photo album generator, perhaps?

  51. Nathan

    February 7th, 2008 at 9:54 am

    I agree. How much were you paid for this “review”? There is zero new here. It’s been around for years, variously known as ePaper, eBooks, ezBooks, oh, and Flash paper.

    If it’s so great, why not publish TechCrunch in the format? And what your usage fall off a cliff and no one ever quote you again because they cannot copy and paste text or other content.

    Utterly useless interface for real usage.

  52. Austin Storm

    February 7th, 2008 at 10:35 am

    I’ve been looking for something like this for awhile… all the solutions I’ve found are way to expensive or too clunky. Thanks!!!

  53. Ernst-Jan

    February 7th, 2008 at 11:06 am

    They’ll probably make a lot of money on the sex magazines section.

  54. randy

    February 7th, 2008 at 1:22 pm

    “Issuu is the place for online publications… it’s the place where YOU become the publisher. Upload a document, it’s fast, easy, and totally FREE. Within seconds you’ll have a super cool online magazine you can post anywhere”

    UH, NO. THAT IS COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT.

    Issuu better provide a way for content owners to search “issuued” documents, so that copyright violators can be contacted.

  55. Joakim Ditlev

    February 8th, 2008 at 1:36 am

    Sure, it is sweet and nice-to-have. And working in this business area, I find it interesting and challenging that digital magazines are entering the web 2.0 era.

    But… from a commercial perspective there is not much to this. #47 mentioned the lack of SE indexability. I can add the missing stats and tracking features, which in fact makes Issuu useless from an e-marketing point of view.

    I miss the value-adding part - besides from looking nice, how does Issuu add value to the end-user???
    We focus on that at Zmags - otherwise we wouldnt have acquired +700 B2B customers in less than 2 years.

  56. Kenobi

    February 8th, 2008 at 2:15 am

    Hey Zmag guy …Issuu is free. FREE!

  57. Joakim Ditlev

    February 8th, 2008 at 2:34 am

    @#56: Sure, and that is a great argument - for end-users and B2C.

    However, in my world Free does not equal Added Value.

  58. Trish

    February 8th, 2008 at 11:36 am

    Interesting - but there are a lot of Flash type viewers like this out there already. Not sure there is much of a business model here, like several comments have indicated. For those of us in the digital magazine service space, having a page flipping UI is just the start. The features, reporting, search capabilities, archiving, user selected sharing, bookmarking, etc are all critical to gaining user acceptance. We have been in the digital edition service space for 5 years and using that knowledge and taking advantage of emerging RIA capabilities, we built the world’s first Silverlight based UI to front our service. You can check out a few samples on our website at
    http://www.advancedpublishing......index.aspx

  59. Dominic

    February 8th, 2008 at 4:47 pm

    While I’m not a big fan of taking printed pubs and putting them on the web as is, it’s extremely difficult to be down on something like this that is FREE. Especially when big public companies are currently paying thousands and waiting days for something similar to be done with their annual reports.

    I was amazed by how quickly Issuu converted a 112-page PDF annual report and how well it works. There are many usability issues with this type of document, and I’m sure some of the companies I deal with would willing spend a little more for a premium edition that included search and a custom skin to make their own sites.

    If the issuu folks are reading this, see this post I wrote about using issuu for annual reportsand please give some thought to the corporate communications market. They are people who will happily pay for something a little more usable for the end-consumer.

  60. asd

    February 13th, 2008 at 12:01 pm

    asd

  61. asd

    February 13th, 2008 at 12:01 pm

    asd111111111111111

  62. asd

    February 13th, 2008 at 12:02 pm

    alert(”asdsad”)

  63. Kapil Tundwal

    March 7th, 2008 at 4:29 pm

    Typically such a work is done after production (using pdf meant for printing) of the source document. Quark is a leading vendor of desktop publishing software and it is highly likely that such documents are created using QuarkXPress. Quark is release a technology preview of QuarkViewer that allows this to happen directly from the application.

    QuarkViewer for QuarkXPress 7:
    http://labs.quark.com/projectdetail.aspx?did=20

    QuarkViewer is an XTensions module for QuarkXPress 7.3.x that allows users to export QuarkXPress layout pages for viewing in Microsoft Silverlight player. QuarkViewer may run as a pure desktop application or a Web application.

    Our approach has been 1 click export. Behavior and user interface are pre-packaged and only relevant data (previews, vector info) is collected during export. Thus this is not meant for production workflow but another way to distrubute your artwork in a rich reading experience environment.

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