Issuu: An Online PDF Viewer You'd Fall In Love With!

eBook readers have witnessed a steep rise lately. The likes of Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook etc. have emerged in a big way.

However I personally feel, when it comes to getting your daily dose of news bits, ePapers have a long way to go before they could completely replace the old-school newspapers. After all, what could be better than having a crisp newspaper in one hand and a nice cup of hot coffee in the other.

Somehow, I've always liked spending some moments of my Sundays with Lounge, "a weekend magazine of business newspaper Mint, that looks at life beyond work; its sections include travel, books, culture, style, play, insider, parenting etc." In a nutshell, a perfect getaway after a busy work week. Now that I am staying at a place where Lounge is not available (demand-supply equation in action), I decided to settle on their ePaper to see what they had to offer on their website.

And guess what- I was enthralled to see the way their ePaper was presented. It's published on a one-of-its-kind publishing platform called Issuu, which is basically a web-based document viewing service by the Danish company.
This platform enables publishers to publish magazines, newspapers etc. in a sleek manner. It turns the uploaded docs into a flippable eBook which is a real show-stopper. The whole reader-experience is so good that you'll simply fall in love with this.

Demo

Key features:

• Faster load time: Issuu stands out on this factor as painfully long load time is a major set-back for most online services.
• Huge customization scope: something that would attract the publishers, designers and developers.
• Publishers may choose to distibute their content on Adobe Flash or other platforms: making it accessible to the huge user pool of the iUsers (iPhone-iPad user groups).
• True full-screen mode: a nicety that makes it eye candy.
• Different view options for diffent requirements i.e. Magazine view, Presentation view and Paper view.
• Embeddability.