Issuu is a cool web service which gives the power for a publisher with a PDF document to extend his reach to more readers. Issuu lets you upload a pdf document and convert that into a nice flip book that is readable via the web. Your reader don’t have to download your document or have to make sure they have a pdf reader like Adobe Reader or the fast & free Foxit Reader installed in their computer to read your document.

Issuu gives you the ability to convert your PDF into an online publication in just a few simple steps for free. It doesn’t stop there. You could embed this online publication in your own website, or on your Issuu profile or just view it with their standalone viewer.

Upload your documents

Once you have created your free account, you can upload your document and name it, tag it, choose a language and your target audience (the world or a specific continent). As one file is being uploaded, you can just press the upload button again to start uploading your other files instead of waiting around for the first upload to complete. You could also tag and provide a search friendly description to your document so others can find it easily.

View your documents

The viewer is very nice & slick and is a joy to use. It shows you the thumbnail of pages you are looking at, at the bottom of the viewer in a Mac OS-X like dock with cool animation effect when you scroll over the thumbnail. Besides the dock, the viewer provides nice arrows on both sides to flip between pages seamlessly and you can have to try it to really appreciate the ease with which you can read through documents. It also gives you the power to zoom into parts of pages if the font size isn’t readable for you. It also has a full screen option to make reading easier with no other distraction.

Share your documents

You could easily share your uploaded documents with your friends by using the ‘Share’ button and sending it to the email addresses you want. You could even add notes to the document and move the notes around to a particular area of interest and when your friend opens the document they would see the note just as you left it. A great way to show someone what you are specifically talking about in a multi-page document. I can see many uses for this particular feature.

Social Networking

Issuu goes beyond being a web application and has all the tools to become a social network around documents. You could create a profile and create and manage your own library of documents. From the People tab, you could browse around and see & meet other users and check out their documents as well. In fact, you can invite your own friends from your email address book to form a community & share documents between yourselves.

Now that you know all about Issuu, is this something you find useful? I would love to hear how you perceive a service such as this.

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