Issuu, a company that lets you upload a PDF or other document and then flip through it easily on a dedicated Webpage or in a small embedded widget, is adding features to its service and site with the aim of becoming a more engaging destination for users. We’re big fans of Issuu—when the company first launched, it was one of the first services of its kind whose interface and functionality didn’t suck. Other popular document sharing services include Docstoc and Scribd.
Issuu says that it’s focusing on adding features to make the the site more of a community for both its free users and enterprise customers. Last year, the startup launched the beta of Issuu Pro, a way for professional publishers to bring their magazines and newspapers to the internet and enhance them with a variety of digital features and the ability to customize the viewing experience. Publications are ad-free (meaning no ads in the viewer from Issuu—any ads in the magazines or documents themselves remain), and publishers were only charged when their content was viewed, with pricing ranging from $1.10 to $19 per 1,000 publication views.
Now, Issuu is taking its enterprise offering out of beta and changing its pricing model to a flat rate of $19 per month for any number of publications and any number of readers. Issuu has also redesigned its homepage for free and enterprise users so that the page gives you information about how your publications are performing including a newsfeed, statistics, and subscribers.
The site has also launched a collaborative Groups feature, where people can collect and discuss publications related to any topic. Anyone can quickly set up a group, style it and then invite friends. You can add publications and/or discussions directly, or by bookmarking a publication while reading it. Groups can be private or public, and about any topic you choose. For example, I found a group called “Travel the World,” which included travel guides.
Issue has enhanced embedding by adding customization and multiple view modes (magazine, presentation, text) and allows a full screen pop-up directly from the embed widget. Each widget now includes a Share menu (think YouTube), where users can share, embed, and explore without leaving the widget. And the site has added a Library feature, a user-friendly manager and publishing tool where you can edit, organize and publish/embed directly from the management platform.
Document sharing services are finding a strong user base and are growing rapidly. Scribd, which also has a community-focus to its user interface, offers the ability to create and join groups. Like Issuu, Scribd has a free service and a premium service for enterprises. According to ComScore’s March numbers, Scribd definitely has the edge over both Issuu and Docstoc, bringing in 12 million unique visitors worldwide in March. Docstoc came in second with 2.89 million unique visitors in March, with Issuu coming in third with 2.4 million unique visitors. On Quantcast, Scribd had 12 million unique visitors in the U.S. in March, Docstoc had 1.4 million visitors, and Issuu had close to 450,000 unique visitors in the U.S. However, Issuu’s new interface and features are really visually compelling and easy to use. Scribd is the frontrunner in the race to be the most popular document sharing service, but Issuu and Docstoc keep adding innovative new features. Competition breeds innovation.
Well, I tried to access the site using Firefox and got:
“The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression. Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.”
May be also the first service of its kind to suck that quickly after having being techcrunched.
yeah, that’s right. Issuu completely overlooked Firefox. It couldn’t be a problem only you are experiencing.
…no issues here with FF 3.0.10. Nice service!
Just signed up and uploaded a couple documents without any problems. Incredible site – liking this more than Scribd.
Do you work for zmags?
I’ve been using DocStoc religiously and have to say it’s much easier to use, and their content base has just grown off the charts.
Issuu is an awesome company.
Much better than Scribd.
Very sexy, but they need to tweak the readability of it. Just like reading a magazine- I open up both pages, look at them, then read each page one at a time.
A couple small changes and I think they’d have a great service. I really like the sexy-factor in what they’re doing too- Scribd is great as a warehouse for documents, but this looks good enough I think they could make it compelling for magazines an advertisers if they could make it a little easier to to read and use.
Issuu offers a terrific service. When you compare the final product from Issuu to the modified PDF-style from Sribd, well…Scribd just looks silly. Ditto for Docstoc.
I would never compare Issuu directly to Scribd. Think of it this way, Scribd is the YouTube of publishing, while Issuu is the Vimeo. For me online publishing is all about preserving the original look and feel of my magazines. So far I haven’t seen anyone do this better than Issuu.
This is an awesome service. Super execution power by the Issuu team!
Really makes me proud to part of the (small, to small) Danish start-up scene.
I love these sites, I’m a big fan of scanning all of my personal documents i.e. bills etc and would love a way of having all of these online being stored in the cloud. Are any of these sites suitable for this?
@mcardlej – interesting idea. In our case, http://www.edocr.com, we are concentrating on the business user, so may not offer the service you have in mind. But privacy settings should permit such in the future (even if not promoted).
Sitting from a distance, issuu is no doubt a great product. The difficulty arises, when specialists such as issuu starts to offer a similar platform to others, which results in diluting the strong reasons of why a particular product is more suited than another for resolving a given problem. Another example is that Slideshare moving beyond the slides to any documents (this may be due to lack of growth potential and associated future revenues).
Above raises the point that will everyone starts to offer the same over time, loosing identity? If so, would customers (most have users) care less, as competition is good for innovation.
Or will how the technology is applied make the difference?
Best regards
Manoj
I found Issuu a few days ago via some Googling and I produced / uploaded a basic pdf brochure – it looks fantastic hosted by Issuu. I use Firefox and have had absolutely no problems.
Since reading this article I’ve taken (an admittedly) very quick look at the other providers and for me Issuu is far more elegant.
Love the fact they are looking outside ads for monetization – not overly common in this space.
Issuu would be best served by making sure its interface is as easy and intuitive to use as it is cool looking. One advantage to a traditional PDF player approach is that even the most novice web user is never surprised by how it works.
It’s interesting that Issuu is getting all this praise for “catching up”. Services like YUDU.com have had all of these features for a while now. With YUDU, you can also sell your publications, add multimedia to your publications, or distribute other forms of media besides printed publications like audio, video, and images. It is true that Issuu has a nice interface, but I don’t know that they deserve a big pat on the back for getting closer to being as good as everyone else.
com certeza é um excelente site,pena que algumas empresas nega seu acesso