Today we are delighted to announce that we have now completed the release of Version 10 of our Flipbooks software. This release has been one of our most challenging to date, as we focused on one of the biggest challenges for our clients, their readers and ourselves. While there are tons of updates, new features and enhancements, the core focus was reducing the production and hosting costs of your digital editions. To see all of the improvements, check out our features list below:
Speed, experience, and cost savings
Version 10 reduces the size of digital editions without compromising the quality and experience. Using new compression techniques, we have completely overhauled our conversion process. Digital magazines created with Version 10 are now 50% smaller on average than a publication created with previous versions. All without any changes to the magazine quality.
Take a look at the following 2 publications. The first was created with Version 9:
https://short.3dissue.com/shutterv9
The link below is the same publication but this edition was converted with v10. The key difference in this instance is that the V10 edition is 60% smaller than the v9 edition, which makes a huge difference to the overall experience that the reader has while viewing your digital publication:
https://short.3dissue.com/shutterv10
In Summary
Halving the size of the digital editions means that:
- Flipbooks will load much faster than previously possible, twice as fast in most cases. Smaller sizes, means pages are retrieved faster and appear much quicker for your readers.
- Publishing times are improved, particularly around the uploading stage were the size of the publication could really slow it down.
- Storage needs will be half of what they were as they are now smaller.
- Bandwidth costs will also be halved for your Flipbooks as the data being sent to your users is much smaller.
Google Tag Manager
We’ve added the ability to integrate Google Tag Manager into your digital editions.
Google Tag Manager is a free tool that allows you to manage and deploy marketing tags (snippets of code or tracking pixels) into your digital editions without having to modify the code. Tag manager allows you to add your own custom tracking and essentially add any other custom javascript you may want into your Flipbook. Once set up Google Tag Manager is pretty incredible as it allows you to customize the data that is sent to your google analytics account. As an example we have a tutorial on adding live chat to a Flipbook:
https://short.3dissue.com/tagchat
Mobile Flip
One of the most common requests from clients was how they wanted Flip experience on the mobile publications. This was something that we could not accomplish in earlier versions of due to the poor availability of technologies in Mobile Web browsers. The experience was always ‘clunky’ and temperamental so we decided not to include it as it would damage the experience. Fortunately, browsers and the HTML5 specification has improved so much that we’re now able to bring Flip to mobile users, while maintaining the great experience.
Mobile zoom experience
Zooming on mobile has been overhauled. Its now more responsive, bandwidth friendly and is a best in class experience when paired with the improved image compression from V10.
Enhanced Printing
Previously if you had the print function enabled in your digital magazines, our Flipbooks reader could collect together all of the pages that the reader wanted to print and then sent images of those pages to the printer. Anyone that has experience with image transfer to printers knows that this can often lead to problems with the print driver; Something that is outside the control of our software. In an effort to enhance this experience we have opted to take a different approach and convert the requested pages into a PDF containing only those pages. This ‘temporary’ PDF is not seen by the client and sent to the printer instead rather than individual images of each page. This leads to a perfect print every time.
Hard Cover Flip
We have now added a small but popular feature that allows you to further enhance that real-world experience of flipping through a hard cover or hard-book publication. This new option allows you to choose between just making the front cover hard or should you wish, the entire publication.
