Publishing e-books using ISSUU

In my last post, I talked about the pleasure of printing and giving (or selling) photo books. After doing a little more investigation, I discovered a really great site for publishing books and magazines online called issuu.

The premise is simple. If you can create a PDF file, you can upload it to Issuu. The site turns the PDF into a flash application simulating a real book or magazine, complete with animation of page turns etc. The best part of this is the capability of exporting the flash file to other websites.

I decided to give this a whirl. But first I had to figure out how to create a PDF file. There are many tools for this, like Adobe Indesign and Microsoft Publisher, but I wanted something cheap or, even better, free. Imagine my delight when I found Scribus! This is a really nice, fully-featured desktop publishing package that allows you to create photo albums (or any other document for that matter) with high quality fonts and full resolution graphics. The interface is very nice (quite intuitive if you're used to Windows or MacOS) and runs on all Microsoft operating systems, including Vista. Scribus also exports to PDF.

So, I created a small photo album using my photos of the Charleboix region of Quebec, uploaded the PDF file to issuu and copied the html fragment into this blog so you can see the little flash application.

Voila...

You can either leaf through the album in miniature by pressing the back and forward buttons or you can click on the album and launch the complete player in its own window.