Don’t mind me. This is a page flipper test

I’m just trying out different “page flipper” (look inside a book) type widget thingos. You can try them out yourself by taking a look (more than 100 pages of my upcoming genre fiction book here for you to read) but I’m really just experimenting for my own purposes.

Let’s start with Scribd.

That worked well, very easy. Scribd seems to be one of the more popular sites for this kind of ‘page flipper’ type excerpt showcase. It’s not the nicest looking embed though.

And we’ll try Issuu.
Hmmm. Can’t work out how to embed here on WordPress.com, so it’s a click-the-link. This is a known problem, supposedly, so might be fixed in future.

But I can embed it on my WordPress.org site (interestingly, NOT using the special WordPress code and plug-in; but I’m not trying to embed into a blog entry over there either…), which is fine. When embedded, it’s far prettier than the Scribd one, but has ads in the full screen mode — fairly unobstrusive, though, for ads…I find it more attractive and intuitive than the Scribd layout. Issuu imposes a file size limit and an overall storage limit (15 GB); you can go the professional option to avoid those limits and the ads. The downside is that if you make changes, you have to re-upload the whole file (rather than a revision) and update the link as well. Lesson: get it right the first time.

I was going to try Bookbuzzr too but while in the middle of signing up and uploading the sample, I tried a few of the other author sites using it, and was unimpressed with how slow it was, and how ungainly looking compared to Issuu. It might be slow due to my internet connection (which is supposed to be high-speed but slows to a crawl in peak time), but both Scribd and Issuu are still loading quickly. I also don’t like the way it forces you to have a fReado.com profile and that I now can’t find a way to delete that profile…

I can’t see the harm in uploading excerpts to both Scribd and Issuu, using the Scribd embed here on my personal site, and the Issuu embed on my publisher’s site. The ads on Issuu are the only thing giving me pause, but as a reader I haven’t found them particularly distracting.

Are there other page flipping options for me to try out?

ETA:

As per Ana’s suggestion in the comments, I’m trying Yudu too.

My first pause came when I saw that Yudu forbids adult content and offensive material…not that I’m publishing erotica over here but there are relatively explicit sex scenes in Bastard’s Grace and of course the title might very well count as offensive right off the bat. I went ahead anyway; we’ll see if I get banned (or how long it takes!). Side Note: “freedom to read” doesn’t generally translate to “we ban anything we don’t approve of.”

Uploading was straightforward. It seemed a little slower than both Scribd and Issuu to process the file, but again, that could be my overloaded connection.

The embed:

Well, I can’t see it (I get a not supported message), but maybe you can? The preview of it looked nice, however, and I wouldn’t mind the big ‘carbon neutral’ sign on this, my personal blog, but it would give me pause on my professional publishing site.

Again I think I prefer the Issuu reader; I find it easier to read and especially like the full-screen mode as opposed to having to zoom — zoom works well for zooming in on magazine articles which don’t often cover the entire page, but not always that well for book text. I think Yudu is better than Scribd, though — I just don’t like the way the Scribd embed looks…on the other hand, it’s the only one working on my blog and the Download-Print-Fullscreen links are fairly obvious, so I can’t be too down on it.