Issuu: Online Magazine Publishing With Strong Design
This is the second review in our series on magazine publishing with web 2.0. To see a primer on the topic with the common features of a publishing application, please see: Publishing Magazines Online With Web 2.0.
Individuals and businesses alike publish magazine format documents, but as publishing tasks transfer increasingly online, applications such as Issuu, with its strong design sense and intuitive features, have become popular outlets for online magazine publishing.
Posting and upload options are attractive; unique urls for your documents, tagging, sound (mp3 and m3u), and public or private settings allow users to customize their documents to capture the audience they are looking for. Each document can be shared, flagged, rated, commented on, or embedded into websites from the reading screen, and each is added (unless marked private) into the Issuu directory, which is searchable by keyword, category, date uploaded, and popularity.
Viewers coming to Issuu will like the clean pages and rapid loading of documents, and will find the reading pane easy to navigate. Controls for page flipping are augmented by the ability to drag and zoom into the documents as users would like, though the default view of the document (a two page spread called Magazine View) is often too small to read. To compensate for this they offer two other views, Presentation and Paper views, which reorient the document to fit the viewer’s needs. Documents can be saved to a “library,” which bookmarks your documents and your favorites into folders that can be customized and organized as you like.
To help you find new materials, or to be more social, Issuu has created a tab for People, where users can browse members, and then begin following, messaging, or subscribing to their RSS feeds. Statistics on members are on their profile pages, and each document’s viewership can be seen by rolling over the document’s thumbnail. Links for sharing documents (email) are on profile and document pages, for quickly sending favorites to friends.
Issuu is free, but offers an ad-free version for business (we saw no ads at the time of this review), which charges by view (starting at $1.1 per 1,000). Google optimized, white label, and with unlimited uploading, the business account may be a strong option for enterprise users looking to increase reach. The drawback to Issuu is that it is web only, and that the file formats for upload are limited to PDF, Word, or Powerpoint.
To read more about Issuu or to find similar applications, there is the Listio search: publish+magazines.
Previously in this series: MagCloud: Online Magazine Publisher, Printer, And Marketplace
Next in this series: Calaméo: Publishing Your Magazine Online
Application: IssuuListio Profile: http://www.listio.com/web20/app/Issuu/
Website: http://www.issuu.com
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Tags: find, magazines, online, publish, share
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