Issuu? Forget it! *This* is what you need!
Everybody knows about Issuu. It’s a way to publish PDFs and distribute them over the Internet with an astonishingly good look & feel. WordPress can directly embed the Issuu flipbook, and it’s a breeze to use. We all know that. We also know that Issuu is a paid service. When you have a 150-page catalogue taking 160 MBytes to load… forget it, you cannot afford to host it on Issuu. You have to do it by yourself. Also, Issuu may not allow all content to be displayed. They have their own reasons for flagging content as inappropriate — in some cases, to view your content, you have to demand that your viewers sign up with Issuu, too (so they can be independently validated, of course). This makes everything much cumbersome. There are many, many PDF viewers out there. In fact, these days, most people don’t even bother with PDF viewers, because most browsers already have the ability to directly view them — no plugin, no JavaScript, nothing else is required. “Ah,” you’d say — since you’re reading this review… “but that’s not the same as the cute animations that Issuu allows. It’s bare-bones PDF viewing — boring! Issuu, on the contrary, brings the user the experience of flipping through a book!” Indeed it does, but what if you have no option but to host the PDFs on your own website? Enter Real3D Flipbook! To be perfectly honest: I have the exact same PDF (aye, it’s 150 pages and 160+ MBytes in size) side by side, on Issue and on Real3D Flipbook. I like Real3D Flipbook more. The flipping animation is nicer and more realistic (and you can even get it to play a flipping sound), using advanced WebGL features such as shading and light rendering. And it’s not an embedded iFrame — rather, this plugin directly accesses the browser’s canvas, so it gets access to more powerful tools (or so I guess). And if you’re scared of serving 160 MBytes (or more!) from your own server, don’t worry — Real3D Flipbook will only render pages on demand, as they get requested by the person viewing the PDF. They will not need to retrieve all pages in advance (of course, that also means that if you flip through a big. heavy PDF very quickly, there will be some pages temporarily rendered as blank pages, until Real3D Flipbook ‘catches up’ with the content being served). Oh, by the way, all the above goodies come as standard on the free version (the one you can get from here). There is a paid version, which you can get from the Envato marketplace. It’s cheap, but it allows much more detailed configuration of all aspects of Real3D Flipbook, have different settings for different PDFs, and so forth. And there is an additional option to store your PDF on their CDN as well, if you’re really concerned about the load on your server. In other words: if you’re actually recommending to a customer a solution for showing PDFs on their website, and your customer is willing to pay for such a service, then, with Real3D Flipbook, you have basically the same service as Issuu, without their restrictions — and without Issuu’s price. And you get a much cooler flipping animation! (Note that even the free version allows more basic rendering — just using CSS, for instance — which will make your pages much lighter. But that’s your choice!) I’m aware that this plugin, while heavily recommended, is not faultless. For instance, it’s clear that it doesn’t get updated all that often. Sometimes, this is not necessarily bad — except for security issues, if the plugin already has all the functionality you need, ‘frozen’ in place, so to speak, why bother to update it, just for the sake of saying ‘hey, a new version is out?’ As an amateur plugin developer myself, that’s the path I take as well. The settings page for the plugin, as well as the online documentation, also suffer from bad spelling mistakes and some confusing organisation overall. It’s clear, from the Envato marketplace, that this plugin stated its life as merely a jQuery-based collection of scripts. Turning it into a plugin (supporting shortcodes and Gutenberg blocks!) required further development, and it’s possible that the ‘adaptation’ of a jQuery-only plugin to work fully integrated into WordPress had its rough edges. Still, one might argue that it could have been done differently, and that both the plugin would benefit from a text revision made by a professional technical writer. It would also be nice if the developer just updated the information about the version of WordPress this works with. I get all those warnings saying that the plugin has never been tested with the most current version of WordPress. The truth is that it works flawlessly (it was well-designed from the start!), it’s just that the developer didn’t bother to update the version on the plugin configuration files. Last but not least, even though this is a standalone plugin, and the same applies to the paid version as well, there are extra goodies that you can install separately, buying them directly from Envato. Some of those goodies are extremely useful, while others might not be relevant. Instead of bundling them all together, you just get the features you wish to pay for. That’s certainly a very appealing business model, and one that allows the developer to continue to add functionality to Real3D Flipbook, but with external modules, additional to the ‘core’. In fact, this is the same concept that made WordPress (and, later, WooCommerce) the most-used CMS in the world: start with a bare-bones (but fully functional!) solution first, and let users pick whatever additional functionality they want — adding these in a modular way (some of which will be paid, but the bulk will be free). Real3D Flipbook adopts the same concept (at a much smaller scale, of course). No wonder it’s so recommended on the popular reviewing sites out there. There might be quite good plugins here and there, many of which free (or at least having an entry-level free version), but none rivals Real3D Flipbook, and most don’t even come close. Not even Issuu.
