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.
