Issuu Review: Magazines never looked so sexy

The new Issuu.com website is so awesome I think I cried when I discovered it.

Get your own – Open publication

Issuu is a website that allows you to upload several pdf’s and form a sleek online Flash based book that you can actually flip through. Being that I am an graphic artist and owner of a magazine myself, I had tried doing this myself some time ago before I found the Issuu website; The result was not pretty. I had to go through seemingly endless steps to get all of the PDFs cropped correctly and converted to flash. The files had to be within certain size restraints before they were uploaded as well and when dealing with print-ready PDFs this process got seriously tedious and I was sick of doing it by the time I manually converted my second book to Flash. I gave up by the 5th release of my magazine and was fed-up with spending hours converting PDFs to a Flash based book manually.

Enter Issuu and today I am a happy publisher. This site takes all of the headache out of the flash conversion. I am not required to down-sample my PDFs before I upload them and it will accept a multi-page PDF, so I only have to upload once and not once for each page (a huge time saver in itself). Now, all I’ve got to do is make a multi-page PDF to match my book (a process that takes about 2 minutes), head on over to Issuu, create a new magazine (takes about 1 minute) and upload my multi-page PDF. I walk away to grab some mid-day coffee, come back and Viola’! My book is now online in a sleek, beautiful online magazine format! I can now embed the online magazine in my website or blog and allow my readers to flip through the magazine online; they can also zoom in, view full screen, share with others on a social media platform and even print a page. Oh and did I mention it is totally FREE?! Seriously, I haven’t gotten this excited about a website since…. well…. never.

If you are a magazine publisher looking for a FREE solution to publishing an online version of your magazine, I highly recommend that you check out Issuu – there is no earthly reason why you wouldn’t want to.

Issuu.com Quick Review:

Purchased: Didn’t have to because it’s FREE at Issuu.com

Issuu.com Benefits:

• Makes fast work of batch uploading PDFs and converting them to an online book
• Flipping pages
• Ability to share your publication on social media sites
• Ability to embed in your website or allow a user to embed in theirs
• Fast loading (each pages loads in advance)
• Super sleek design
• Multiple views of pages
• Page zooming
• FREE

Issuu.com Drawbacks:

• None, Zip, Zero that I have found so far

The Mrs. gives Issuu.com 5/5
Because it doesn’t get much better than this for a print publisher to put a magazine online in it’s original format