There 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.
Practical and Nice!!! wow
Sorry to report that issuu now does suck. They changed everything and added a huge advertising banner across the right side of the scree. You have to by their professional version to get rid of it. But then they put their logo on every page you tgry to publish. Stay away from them then sucked people in, got their good reviews (as here) and then changed the game.
THANK YOU!!! PDF’s downfall would eventually be its unfriendly user experience …
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.
This is interesting…being a designer, makes sending and sharing my portfolio easier…
http://whizolve...l.aspx?cnslt=35
Hey Erick,
shouldn’t “Issue” in “who discovered Issue two days ago” be spelled “Issuu?”
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?
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’
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!
It does have a fullscreen option. The link is at top right. Wow. This is a really smooth app.
>>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.
This shit is sick yo!
Wouldn’t it be nice if Issuu were a web service invoked automatically when you click on a pdf link on any site?
you’re right, it doesn’t suck.
There are so many good things that you miss
Looks like a nice Flex app… it failed on processing the PDFs I uploaded though
. Really nice UI and functionality otherwise.
marc (above) – awesome idea – OR you could just get a mac and do this in safari.
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....m/360/360c1.swf
Fantastic.
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.
Pretty cool stuff. I actually wrote about this last week:
http://websidev...een-with-issuu/
It definitely looks nice, but it doesn’t work as well as an embeddable document for reading as Scribd does.
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…
absolutely beautiful.
say farewell to e-zines.
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.
Credit where credit is due: The Next Web blog beat all of you, and posted this 4 days ago: http://thenextw...shing-20-style/
Awesome!
@25 – I posted mine on 1/29 if you want to get stupid about it.
acquisition target for Google Catalogs
http://catalogs...jack&lcat=0
is this pagegangster?
Hello,
This is one is better :
http://vuzit.com/
Unlike issuu , you could also upload documents by URL , not only by uploading it manually.
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.
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?
this is oooooooooold. swiss evening newspaper HEUTE uses issuu for publishing it’s pdf-epaper – since today
http://www.heut...bend.ch/epaper/
Actually its not a pdf viewer, its an image viewer. They Convert the pdf on their servers to jpg’s.
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.
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.
Awesome! But as Mark said, it´s an image viewer with a conversion tool.
The viewer is pretty smooth but the website is too slow IMHO
A lot of credit goes to the architect/developer of this app:-
Manish Jethani – http://www.link...com/in/mjethani
http://manishjethani.com/blog/
-abdul
This is grt……i love it….
http://www.collegenews.com/mag
(Google + University of Michigan + Issuu) = The end of microfilm.
Issuu got it all – great
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.
@#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.iss...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
@ 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
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.
Interesting business model, wonder how they keep the servers running?
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
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?