Finally, a Web-based PDF Viewer That Does Not Suck (Issuu)

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.

http://static.issuu.com/webembed/viewers/style1/v1/IssuuViewer.swf

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