A truly modern media company, Issuu gives anyone with digitally bound content the ability to upload and distribute their publications worldwide. In just minutes. And as often as they’d like. Each day, more than 20,000 newly uploaded publications become instantly available to active readers around the world.
Readers who use Issuu’s site and mobile apps to discover and engage with what they love. From magazines, newspapers, and portfolios, to catalogs, DIY guides, community programs, and more. Creators everywhere choose to publish on Issuu because they get what they need to grow. Including collaboration tools, advanced analytics, and the ability to charge for publications.
Generally speaking, Issuu Collaborate is the best way for lean editorial teams to work together. From flat planning, assigning articles and placing ads, integrating with Adobe InDesign®, managing the review process, and publishing a final PDF, your whole workflow is managed seamlessly in one place. You can learn more about that here.
In the end, their readers are rewarded with the absolute best reading experience possible — regardless of device or platform. Headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, Issuu also has offices in Copenhagen, Berlin, and New York City.
How Does Issuu Work?
Just like Pocket, Issuu is one of the leading digital publishing platforms. It allows you to create your own digital publication and distribute it. If you are not interested in publishing, you can read and find a great ton of magazines on the platform. Same as with other Issuu competitors.
Basically, rather than sending your content to traditional publishers for publishing and printing out hard copies, you can send your content to Flipsnack or Yumpu, to publish your Issuu publications digitally in the realm of the internet. Other benefits of publishing your own flipbook? With software like Yumpu.com, you get a ton of great benefits for free!
Well, as previously mentioned, Issuu allows you to create online content including magazines, publications, catalogs, books, and the like by uploading PDF files. You do not need to worry about whether is Issuu legal. *If you would not have already guessed it: Issuu is legal – so continue reading to find out how it works.*
Issuu, a Joomag alternative, will simply take those PDF files and convert them into flash readable content publications. By posting your magazines online, you are able to reach a much wider audience. And with billions of people going online daily, there are endless opportunities of growth.
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By all means, Issuu has come a long way since its humble beginnings in 2006. Currently, it boasts more than 100 million unique visitors per month. However, a lot of people ask: Is Issuu free for readers? Yes, it is free for readers.
But, it offers 4 different plans & Issuu pricing for publishers who want to publish magazines, and that’s how it makes money. That said, you can pay and set up your billing to be either monthly or annually. Not forgetting, for annual payments, they offer discounts as well.
You start off with the Basic Plan that is free of charge. In this plan, you get to upload, embed, and share your media.
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The Plus Plan costs $26/month and includes reader customizations, an ad-free reader, and some analytics. While the Premium Plan costs $35/month and adds features to brand your reader, drive user engagement with advanced analytics.
Then again, the Optimum Plan is Issuu’s highest-priced offering and will set you back by $279/month for added features that include unlimited space, a collaborative tool for editorial teams called magma. Magma includes integrated InDesign for designing your publications/magazines.
All its product plans come with a 14-day free trial, so you can get a feel for all the features provided by Issuu without having to pay anything. If after using the platform you are comfortable with it, you can go ahead and buy one of the plans that fit your needs best.
What Are Its Key Features?
Notably, you can create and discover the best mobile stories and digital content right on the Issuu app. The Issuu Story Cloud offers a suite of publishing tools to create Stories and full-length publications for social and mobile in an immersive reading experience.
All this helps you to broaden your audience and tap into the power of mobile Stories—today’s hottest content format. With that in mind, you can download the Issuu app to create Stories or read Stories.
The cloud tools include:
- Share Stories to Instagram,
- Select Story Style or even Build Stories from text + photo content,
- Preview Visual Stories in-app and Add animations,
- Generate a video for each page of content for easy sharing on your social networks,
- Publish in AMP format on amp.issuu.com and Save videos to phone.
Issuu is the storytelling platform and the first-ever integrated Issuu Story Cloud for creators, marketers, editors, and businesses. Now you can create mobile Stories on the Issuu app straight from your uploaded content. With just a few taps you can build, preview, and share stories on Instagram and publish in the AMP format.
The core features include:
- Unlimited Publishing: Using Issuu allows you to publish as many publications/magazines as you want, there is no limit on the number of publications. However, there is a limit on the size and no. of pages of each publication.
- Embedded Reader: With a few lines of code, you can embed your publication on any other website.
- HTML5 Reader: With the HTML5 reader how does Issuu work is that your subscribers can view your publication directly in their browsers, they do not need to install any separate Issuu app for this.
- Native Apps: along with HTML5 reader, Issuu has also launched native apps for iOS and Android. But here a lot of users wonder how to use the Issuu app.
- Analytics: Gives you the power to view your users’ engagement with your publishing, identify page views and areas for improvement, and come to know what content is currently popular with your readers.
- Sharing: We all love to share on social platforms. You can do the same with your publication. Just make sure you are getting your publication-ready, to easily share it with leading social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and co., in a matter of few clicks. You just have to log into your social media account.
For more details about how to share your digital publications with the public – please check the related article on the WordPress Issuu plugin to share publications. Additionally, you can also follow them on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and even Instagram.
Does Issuu Have Any Downsides?
Unfortunately, Issuu does not allow you to use embed audio or video into your publications. Bearing in mind, these features are provided by Issuu competitors like Yumpu or Joomag. It also puts a limit of uploading a PDF file to a maximum of 500MB and your publication can not be longer than 500 pages.
Now that the Issuu free alternative Joomag or other related Joomag competitors allow you to upload unlimited pages. We believe with the sheer amount of clients too; it is becoming difficult for its support to cope up. And as such, it needs to expand its team proportionally related to its overall growth.
Definitely, we suggest that you take a look at Issuu and other Flipsnack alternatives to find out which software is most appropriate for you. Our personal favorite being Yumpu. But surely, the most widely used publisher platform features offered are quite ok (for a monthly fee).
Takeaway,
As can be seen, Issuu makes it very easy for you to share your magazines on all the leading social media sites. Including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For further details on how to share your publications/magazines or whether to use the WordPress Plugin for embedding it into your website, have a look at their other blog articles.
Issuu provides a fast and easy way to upload PDF files and transform them into a digital page flip publication. The converted magazine features fluid zoom-in and zoom-out and page-turning animations. Although the analytics and user engagement information provided are not free, they provide valuable insights into the readers’ reading patterns and their reading experience.
Like which pages are being read the most, how much time readers are spending on a particular page, and much more. This information is crucial for knowing what content your readers like, and what content not so much.
Finally, we hope the above-revised profile guide was useful to you or even your content creators. But, if you’ll need more help, please feel free to Contact Us or even leave your additional thoughts in the comments section. Also, don’t forget to donate in order to support our blog articles research work, and other ongoing projects here.
