I was looking for a Blurb Discount because I had a client that wanted me to distribute print editions of their magazine on Blurb. I found that when I was printing, it was an adequate site for my needs. Recently, my client found religion in the form of mobile applications as the only medium for their needs and I realized that Blurb was not the service that I needed for their magazine or my own publications.
I decided to look for a service that provided the best user experience for online readers without looking for a Blurb Discount voucher because all of them don’t work. I didn’t spend much time looking before I found Yumpu Publishing. Here are some reasons I went there and have been there for quite some time now:
Mobile Applications Are Part Of Their Service
After I had spent some time working with Yumpu Publishing and their knowledgeable support agents, I put together a presentation for my client and showed them what the strengths of the platform were. They were suitably impressed and agreed that it was a direction that we should move forward in. A couple of highlights from the presentation:
• We did a side-by-side mobile comparison of readers with Yumpu Publishing’s e-paper versus PDF files. The client was very set against using PDF for their readers after they saw how fast E-paper was.
• We used a mobile application that allowed the client to see that they were included with only our magazines in a kiosk fashion on a table. This reassured them that they would have a better chance of being read by our users.
E-paper Can Also Bring Feedback
In a perfect world, most of our magazine clients want to know specifically what their clients are interested in. In the digital format, they rarely asked for feedback beyond understanding how many likes an embedded post would get. With E-paper, feedback on specific articles and advertisements can easily be embedded in the publication itself, lowering the cost of creating that type of content and making it easier for me to offer it as a service. Because of this, we have already received requests to innocuously add simple survey questions that can help our clients go above and beyond to provide real-time feedback.
Feedback is also important for our advertisers and so the ability to link directly to a shop in an advertisement brings a whole new set of statistics to bear on the efficiency of an ad for them. Of course, links can be made from a PDF, but they are much cleaner in E-paper format and the seamlessness should pay off in a higher conversion rate.
How I got started:
Of course, I was looking for a Blurb Discount code, but then I discovered Yumpu Publishing which is really easy to work with as far as a workflow process is concerned. If you are used to developing in Photoshop or generating PDFs for your material, it is as simple as dropping your output in PDF format onto an area of their website for the conversion to begin immediately. Once the document has been converted, you will have several options to enhance the layout and personalize the look of the magazine or document that you are creating. I normally would put up screenshots and walk you through the process, but I am confident that there are no gotchas or areas that require further explanation. As it is free, it would probably be better to recommend that you experience the process for yourself.
Where I am going
Now that I am committed to providing publishing and marketing services using Yumpu Publishing as a platform, I plan to extend the number of kiosks that I have by grouping magazines and documents that are catered to people with categorically similar interest areas into separate kiosks. The nice thing is that regardless of whether or not you want to target mobile users specifically or are happy with providing your work to them in online fashion, Yumpu Publishing will allow you to do both or either. Every device from smartphones to laptops is designed to be able to display and work with e-paper.
