Pixels from the Edge

Every now and again I run across a site/web app/web service that gets me really excited and restores my faith in the power of the web and the power of the people that make the web – the users and the developers. And today that site is Issuu.com. In a nutshell it is the YouTube of magazines. Any budding publisher can now make their work instantly available to the world, and the rest of us can spend our time enjoying the creative work offered. And just like YouTube the magazines you create are embeddable into your website (it does look like embedding a magazine is locked down to just the publisher as you can only assign one domain per account), here’s an example (click “Read Winds&Sails.pdf now” to launch embedded magazine).

I haven’t done more than explore a little so I can only report back that for a user the magazine interface is a pleasure to interact with and makes the magazines look really good. The site itself is very clean so I imagine that the admin interface for publishing is quite tidy and intuitive, for example publishing a magazine is as simple as uploading a pdf. A lot of the magazines look very professional, like as if they are actually primarily physically published and distributed, though I haven’t come across anything I recognize as mainstream. There are even comics too! One tiny issue I do have is that it seems there is not a good way to print a magazine out all at once, you have to do it on a page by page basis (maybe there’s a good reason, and there is a premium service that might addresses this), and I know that we have to save the trees and all that, and I am married to my computer and the web, but I am still that guy that likes to print stuff out and take it down to the cafeteria and kick back and read it old school style, get away from my laptop every now and again (I always recycle I promise).

So that’s that, Issuu.com, I think it’s great. Not the first attempt at an online magazine service I’m sure, but by far the best I’ve ever come across, on a par with YouTube or Hulu for its medium. Go take a look and have some fun, and if you come across anything really worth reading make sure you let me know!

Tags: Social Media, Web 2.0, Web Apps

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 9:11 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.